City of Ash and Red Read online

  Health centers in every district were expanded, and quarantine levels rose. In addition to the fumigants used by the sprayer trucks, aerial sprayings and disinfection services for private residences would soon begin. According to rumors coming out of districts that had already reinforced their disease control measures, workers were dragging manual sprayer pumps inside buildings to disinfect them—residents complained that the spray reeked of mothballs and sulfur. Many gagged at the smell and their skin broke out in rashes, but they stifled their nausea and refrained from treating their rashes with ointments. Because rashes were among the symptoms of infection, they feared they would be mistaken for being ill if they were seen purchasing medicine.

  Stories continued to abound regarding the epidemic, but none of it amounted to anything more than hearsay. No one knew the truth. The more exaggerated the information, the further the rumors spread. But the one comfort was the fact that, still, far more deaths were caused by traffic accidents, chronic disease, and old age than by the virus making its rounds.

  The security guards stood stock-still, in the at-ease position, with their hands behind their backs. But they looked less like they were ready to pull their weapons the instant danger presented itself than like they were enjoying watching the occasional passerby outside the front door.

  The man stared hard at one of the guards. The full hazmat suit and dust mask left only a small part of the body exposed—eyes, forehead—making it difficult to tell whether it was the same guard he had spoken to last time. When the guard approached him, clearly intent on kicking out this shabby-looking interloper, he explained that he wanted to check the status of his request. Though he had practiced the question several times on his way there, he still stumbled over the words. This was enough to make the guard realize that he was a foreigner and decide to hear the man out rather than kick him out. The guard asked if he needed help. When the man repeated his question about the request form that he had submitted, the guard strolled over to the counter and opened the same drawer as before. It was stuffed with request forms, just as before. The guard slowly flipped through the sheets of paper, one by one, checking to see if the man’s form was among them. But the guard’s leisurely movements were not some earnest response to the man’s inquiry; rather, they were his way of showing off the one privilege he could call his own.

  “Your application isn’t here,” the guard said, closing the drawer. “But that could mean anything. It could mean good news, or it could mean bad news. Do you understand?”

  The man nodded and asked, “So if it’s good news, then I’ve been granted a meeting?”

  “If you were granted a meeting, they would have contacted you by now. Have you heard from anyone? If not, that could mean it’s still in process.”

  “And if it’s bad news?”

  “Bad news means your application was rejected, or your request was discarded due to some clerical error before it could be reviewed by the higher-ups. It’s unfortunate, but that sort of thing does happen all the time.”

  “Is there any way of finding out?”

  “Not as things currently stand. I’ve got nothing to tell you.”

  “You’re the only one here I can ask.”

  “Look, I’m just a security guard. I greet visitors, I take request forms, and I send the forms upstairs. The rest of the time, my job is to stand here looking friendly and intimidating at the same time. Oh, and the other important thing I do is if someone drops a tissue, I pick it up, and if the floor gets dirty, I mop it. That’s why I’m extra busy on rainy days. I have to spend the whole day mopping the floor. And each time I get an earful about how the lobby is the face of the company. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. So, how can I find out whether my request was accepted or not?”

  “You have to ask the person in charge upstairs. To meet that person, you can fill out this form—”

  “My request is very urgent.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it is. All requests are urgent. But look. Even before this mayhem started, we had thousands of employees working here. Sure, some of the sick ones got weeded out, but most are still here, plugging away at their jobs. Everyone has a job to do, no matter what’s going around. In fact, most of the employees don’t bother to leave the building. When you do see someone leaving, it’s either because they’re suspected of being sick and are getting kicked out, or they took it upon themselves to take a break. This entire building is basically one big clean room. Every single person who comes here to sell something or meet with an employee—yourself included—has to fill out a meeting request form. No exceptions. We get hundreds of these forms a day. In fact, we get so many that we had to hire someone just to go through them. One guy came in here looking for an employee whose parent had died—he had to fill out a form, too. Like I said, no exceptions. That may sound cruel, but rules are rules. Can’t do anything about it. I was the one who told him to fill out a form, and of course I was the one who took shit for it. It’s not even up to me to decide whose form is accepted! The applications were so backed up that by the time his request for a meeting was accepted, the funeral had already happened. Another time, one of the employees’ sons was in a car accident and they needed blood from him for a transfusion. I wasn’t the one on duty that time, but it made no difference. None of us security guards have the authority to okay an application. Same situation then, too. By the time his request went through, it was too late. Couldn’t even give blood to his own son. From what I heard, they shared a rare blood type. Who knows? Maybe the story was exaggerated . . . but I guess your situation is just as urgent? Please, by all means, let me help you. How about if I move your application to the top of these hundreds of other applications? That’s the only thing I can do. I have no idea how they handle these upstairs. Oh, wait. I keep forgetting you’re not from here. Do you understand?”

  The security guard stared at him and smiled. The man was anxious and wanted to ask more questions, such as how long he would have to wait to find out the results of his application, and whether he would need to fill out another application if his request was rejected. But when faced with the guard’s friendliness that came purely from lack of interest and his show of understanding for a matter that did not pertain to him, the man realized there was no point in asking anything at all. And yet, he found it difficult to walk out of there. After a while, another man, relatively well-dressed, came in and complained to the security guard that the application he had filed several days earlier still had not been received upstairs. When he heard the guard give the other man the exact same explanation, he finally left.

  It would take a very long time for his application to get processed, and even then he might not be able to meet with Mol. He could stand in front of the building all day and wait for Mol to come by, but that was just as pointless. He had talked to Mol over the phone only twice, and no more. His grasp of the language was not enough to have what you would call a proper conversation. Even if he stood there holding up a cardboard sign, he would still only find Mol if Mol walked up to him first, and there was little chance of that happening. Mol could walk right past him without him recognizing Mol. In fact, the security guard he’d just spoken to could have been Mol himself, and he still would have been none the wiser.

  “There’s got to be a way,” the old man said.

  “It’s impossible without identification.”

  The old man had trouble understanding the man’s accent. He repeated himself several times, but the old man continued on without any indication of whether he had understood.

  “I’m sympathetic but not lenient. I don’t mind helping people who are down on their luck, but I can’t stand stupid people. I hate stupid people the most. When they’re too stupid to grasp what’s going on, I try to tell myself it’s because they’re too nice or maybe just too naïve. They’re the ones who mess things up in the end. But don’t tell me you’re hoping to fly back first-class or something?”

  “You mean there might be a way?”
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  “Yeah, but you’ll never find it on your own. You don’t know anyone, and you’ll just hurt your leg again if you start running around. Your leg may have healed, but it looks terrible, which means you won’t have an easy time of getting the other thing you need.”

  The old man grinned, exposing his yellow teeth. His breath was foul.

  “What’s the other thing?”

  “Money!”

  His face dropped, and the old man hurried to add, “Don’t forget. The less likely you are to have money, the more you need it. In other words, it’s time for you to figure out where to get some.”

  He stared at the old man and waited for him to continue. The old man let him stew for a moment and then reluctantly asked, “Have you been to the harbor? Ever been on a boat?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, these are different kinds of boats than the ones you’ve been on. I’m talking about container ships. You just have to, you know, export yourself. Back to your home country. That’s where you’re trying to get to, right? Box yourself up like merchandise.”

  “Export myself?”

  “Yeah, export. Don’t worry, no one would want to buy you. Who on earth would buy a dirty thing like you, unless it’s to use you as a slave? I just mean pack yourself inside a box. A big, wooden crate. Of course, you can’t just get in the box and go. You need supplies. And that’s where money comes in, you see? Before you get in the crate, you need, you know, some kind of breathing apparatus or whatnot. My point is, money will get you that stuff. You’ll need it to breathe and stay alive. So you’ve got to scrape some cash together. Smugglers don’t make all that money for nothing. Then, let’s see . . . after you have your supplies, you plaster those invoices, the kind with barcodes, onto yourself. You’ll need that to make it through inspection. Then your crate is loaded onto the ship. After a while, thousands of other wooden crates are loaded onto the ship with you, and you’re off. Rolling back and forth with the waves until you’re home free!”

  As a matter of fact, the man had heard of people leaving the country that way before, but as with all rumors, the old man’s knowledge was only hearsay. As he listened to the old man talk, he wondered how he might be able to earn some money, and the thought made him impatient. To his surprise, his impatience pleased him. Impatience and fear both spring from anticipation of the future. And if you’re not anticipating anything, then there’s no reason to rush.

  The old man said to come talk to him again after he’d found some money and lay down with his back turned. Just then, the man heard the dull metal clunk of the manhole cover opening. The cover had to be opened with a key, so none of the sewer dwellers ever used it. A breeze blew in, and a rag or a towel that someone had left hanging on the ladder flapped as if in greeting.

  The first thing to appear was the round beam of a flashlight. The beam landed on the dark floor at the base of the ladder. The man wondered who would appear in its spotlight. Two legs clad in a thick hazmat suit poked in. They stepped on the cloth hanging from the rungs as they made their way down. He heard the owner of the cloth start to curse and then instantly turn quiet upon realizing that the shoes that had trampled on his cloth were heavy army boots.

  As the rest of the hazmat suit came into view, the flashlight swung more ruthlessly across their faces. Several of the vagrants who had lain there unmoving, lazy and indifferent, like stains permanently etched into the ground, slowly sat upright as the beam landed on them. They began to whisper among themselves. It was the first time anyone dressed in a hazmat suit had appeared inside the sewer.

  At last, the man wielding the flashlight was fully visible. A dead rat dangled from an oversized silver glove. He held it by the tail; each time he moved, the rat’s body dangled and swayed. He spun it around in circles like he was getting ready to toss it and then chucked it hard at one of the vagrants lying nearby. No one screamed. There was no point. A dead rat couldn’t steal your food. The vagrant nonchalantly picked the rat up by its tail and flung it back at the man with the flashlight. The flashlight man flinched and jumped out of the way.

  Then, as if to save face, the flashlight man took an intimidating stance and asked the vagrant a question. They were too far away for the man to hear what was being asked, but he thought he made out the word “rat.” He tried to think of what sorts of questions one would ask about rats. The first that came to mind was, “Why did you kill this rat?” But why would anyone bother to ask that? Rats were the kind of animal that pretty much anyone would regard as needing to be killed. Next, he thought, “Why did you leave this dead rat under the bridge?” and “Why didn’t you kill more rats?” and “Why did you kill it so viciously?” He also considered: “Who killed this rat?” and “What did you use to kill it?” But he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to know those things either.

  From the whispered responses to the flashlight man’s question, he gathered that they were blaming someone for the rat. He wondered what was happening, but before he could be certain of anything, the old man, who was sitting near the flashlight man, swiveled his head around and pointed directly at him.

  The flashlight shone on him. He squinted in the glare and thought maybe the question hadn’t had anything to do with rats after all. Maybe “rat” was just figurative. Back in his home country, there were plenty of idiomatic expressions involving rats, and it was no doubt the same in this country. The question he feared most was, “Where is that little ratfuck?” If that’s what was asked, then that meant the flashlight man was a detective. But even if the two countries had an extradition treaty, no one would bother coming all the way down into the sewers just to track down another country’s criminal.

  That thought alone made him unsure of whether to run or not, and while he hesitated, the flashlight man came closer. He took a few slow steps back and then turned and ran beneath the tangle of pipes, past the vagrants sitting and lying on the ground. The beam of light stayed right on his tail. He was soon out of breath and had just thought to himself that if he was going to dive into the water then now was the time, when he stumbled. It wasn’t from exhaustion. Someone had stuck out a leg to trip him.

  The light illuminated his face. The flashlight man and several others who had come down the ladder with him grabbed hold of the man. They took his temperature and pried open his jaw to shine the light down his throat. He struggled and tried to twist his body out of their clutches so he could escape, and kicked at the man to his right. The man to his right struck him on the legs as hard as he could with a nightstick.

  “Stop fighting!” the man to his right said. “You’ll thank me later. You’ll thank me for not letting you get away.”

  He cursed at the man to his right in his native tongue, knowing that no one there would understand him. The man to his right barked with laughter.

  “Remember this moment. This is how it goes for us. We bust our balls to get work done, and not a word of thanks to show for it. Instead, we get kicked and cussed at.”

  The man was dragged aboveground, with the old man trailing behind as if to see him off. Outside, the flashlight man handed the old man a few coins. When he saw the old man smile and take the money, his yellow teeth bared, the man’s head ached as if a monkey were clinging to it.

  THREE

  The routine was simple and straightforward. He got out of bed at the sound of the bell: a short, repetitive, mechanical-sounding melody that echoed through the barracks. After a quick washing up, he and the other men stood in rows and had their temperatures checked. If their temperature was high or they had a cough, they were sent to a separate examination room, and if they were within normal range, they were sent to the mess hall for breakfast. Some took pains to raise their temperature on purpose, so they could take a break from working while getting a secondary inspection in the exam room. They would rub their hands together hard and then place their heated palms against their foreheads, or purposefully wait at the end of the line, jogging and running in place or holding their breath until th
ey got to the front, in order to make themselves flushed and warm. If the secondary health inspection revealed more symptoms, they were sent to a nearby hospital. And if the complete checkup they received there revealed multiple matching symptoms, or so the man was told, then they were removed from the quarantine barracks and sent to an isolation ward on the outskirts of the city. Nobody wanted to go to the isolation ward. No one had ever returned from there. Though they said the mortality rate was low, nobody was going to give former vagrants unlimited medical care.

  After breakfast, they returned to the barracks where they changed into hazmat suits, received their packed lunch rations, and boarded the work vans for their assigned districts. Their lunches usually consisted of steamed white rice squeezed into fist-sized chunks. For someone like him, who had been homeless long enough to lose all pickiness and be left with only appetite, he had no particular complaints about the food, other than the fact that the tiny amount was only enough to take the edge off of his hunger.

  The person who had come down into the sewer looking for him was the head of a door-to-door extermination team. Pairs of men were dispatched from each team to search individual residences for pests. They were absurdly understaffed. Since it was not clear how exactly the epidemic had been spreading, people were resorting to superstition and knowledge of past outbreaks. The epidemic this time was suspected of being caused by rats, just like another epidemic that had once terrorized the world. The only proof of this was the plague of rats infesting the city. The rat population had boomed. Rats bit children fast asleep in bed. They defecated inside closets and broke dishes in kitchens. When spotted astride crossbeams or crawling up to kitchen ceilings, eliciting screams, they free-fell from their perches and shot like arrows across the kitchen floor, as if their plan all along had been to startle and alarm. And yet for all of that, the number of rats was not so unusual. They were merely more conspicuous than before, and that was due to the trash in the streets, not to the virus.