City of Ash and Red Page 18

  For no other reason than that it was difficult to keep his grasp on the struggling woman, with no other intent but to stop her from screaming, he fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the dull knife he had found long ago in the trash. He squeezed the handle tight, worried that his sweaty palms might make him drop it, and felt once again the throbbing sensation that had plagued him long ago. The ache in his hand was like a shadow that followed him always, sometimes stretching out long, sometimes shrinking down small, and right now it covered him from head to toe. From inside that ache, he brought the knife to the woman’s throat with a familiar gesture. He meant only to scare her. The knife was so dull that there was hardly any difference between the blade and the spine. Stabbing someone with it wouldn’t be easy, and even if he did stab her, the wound would not be fatal. But the woman had no way of knowing that. She let out a scream so filled with terror that it sounded pitiful, even to his ears.

  As if in response to her scream, a car horn beeped. It sounded like it was right outside. Or it might have been somewhere off in the distance. It was difficult to tell exactly where the sound came from. The woman saw the worry in his eyes and screamed again. He used the knife then, because it was the only way to shut her up. He had meant only to scare her, but the shadow pressed down heavily on him. He waved his hand around wildly, just to get out from under the weight of that shadow. His hand did not stop moving until a gush of blood hit him in the face. Blood spattered on his hand, which he had clenched so hard it was going numb, and all over his protective suit.

  The smell of unfamiliar blood cracked the seal on his memory: he knew at once that this had all happened before. The sensation of squeezing a metallic weapon in his hand and of being splattered with blood was entirely different from that of chopping off rats’ tails or mercilessly smashing their bodies to bits. The familiarity of the sensation made him understand at last why he had thrown himself into the garbage to escape all those days ago. His first thought was of feeling an odd sort of relief that was incomprehensible even to him. It seemed he had wasted a great deal of time in Country C in pursuit of that relief. And, he thought of his ex-wife. He thought about her round face and nasal voice and kind eyes and pouty lips. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. That soft, round face. That whiny, girlish voice. The innocent yet playful gleam in her eyes. The pouty, amorous lips. He dropped to his knees, and the woman fell with a resounding thump beside him. If she died, it wouldn’t be from the knife, it would be from the impact of her head against the hard floor. He hunched over and used the hem of her dress to wipe the blood from his suit. Even if she did die, her body would not be discovered right away. People had mostly stopped visiting each other ever since the epidemic had begun. Employees who didn’t show up for work were presumed infected and were automatically placed on sick leave.

  The sun was already on the verge of setting, but it was so bright outside that he was momentarily blinded. He walked slowly out into the light. The work van had not yet arrived. A garbage truck pulled up, and two men jumped down and got to work tossing the piles of trash in the street into the back of the truck. He gazed vacantly at the sight of the trash being cleanly swept away.

  ONE

  The mirror on the metal locker in the changing room reflected his gaunt face back at him. The face in the mirror looked hard. He was dizzy, his head as loose as a compass needle, and it made him nauseous. He let out the cough he had been suppressing. The symptoms had not gone away, but they only came at intervals, like a yawn, and never got any better or worse. Along with the cough, his constant slight fever had persisted for a long time. But for all he knew, his usual body temperature might have simply gone up a degree.

  His vertigo was about as pronounced as the shaking during the recent earthquake. It wasn’t a very big quake. Certainly not the major quake that had long been forewarned. And there had been no signs just before it struck. His apartment shook a little. The aged building suffered a cracked wall and lost a few weathered wooden boards. But he wrongly assumed that the quake wasn’t big enough to kill anyone. Some people did die. The moment the buildings began to sway, they mistook it for the big one and jumped out of their windows in fright, thinking only of getting away from the buildings. Other than those people, there were no fatalities.

  Though it was fortunate it was a small quake, he couldn’t help feeling cheated and therefore despondent. But he soon took heart. The big one would come eventually. There was no telling when. There was no telling where. That was why everyone feared a major quake. To prepare for this eventuality, he had flocked to the supermarket along with all of his team members and bought a camping toilet that looked like a baby’s potty and several varieties of canned goods that he would never have otherwise eaten. The quake that did finally come turned out to be so slight that he didn’t need any of his supplies. He kept them all stacked under the table in the middle of his living room, in preparation for the big one that might still come one day.

  He had been inside a restaurant pantry during the small quake. It was a large, well-equipped pantry. He had moved aside a box of onions and startled a large rat crouching underneath. It scurried over to the wall. He left it alone to escape wherever it wished. It didn’t matter. It would have to come out eventually to eat the poisoned bait he’d placed all around the pantry, and when it did, its body would turn stiff and it would die. When he picked up the next box of onions, he spotted a dozen or more dirty, gray rats running single file along the wall and through a hole that led outdoors. He watched the rats fleeing their home in terror. Something was coming. He did not know what.

  The rats vanished from sight, and as he lifted the next box containing potatoes, he felt his body tilt. He thought at first it was from the weight of the box. Either it was too heavy, or maybe he was having another attack of vertigo. But then the box was visibly tilting, and the potatoes that filled the box began dropping to the floor like startled rats. He watched the potatoes roll away and realized that it was not the box but the earth that was tilting, and that he, too, was tilting. He lay down flat to keep from falling over, the floor swaying gently beneath him like the bottom of a boat. It had reminded him of an old man he’d met once long ago. An old man with teeth so brown they verged on black. An old man who had told him that he could board a container ship in exchange for money. He had felt thrilled by the old man’s claim to be able to send the man anywhere in the world despite never going anywhere himself. Had he boarded a container ship as the old man told him to, he would have crossed the ocean amid this constant swaying with no clue as to where he was.

  “I’ve got good news.”

  The boss approached the man just as he was about to change into his gray coveralls. His new boss was short and thin and always dressed in dark gray, and he talked in a high-pitched voice, so everyone called him Cricket. When he found out they were calling him that, all he said was, “Hey, at least I’m not on the extermination list!” which earned him the enduring respect of his work team.

  “You don’t look so good. Another headache?” His boss looked worried.

  “It’s nothing. Happens all the time.”

  “Shame you can’t just chop your head off!” His boss laughed. “I know an amazing trick for getting rid of headaches. Want to know what it is? If you want to stop feeling your headache, just get a stomachache, a backache, or a toothache instead!” He laughed again. “I’m just kidding with you. But it’s true that the only way to control an illness is with an illness.”

  When the man did not laugh, his boss straightened his face and lowered his voice.

  “This is strictly between you and me, but there’s going to be a review of the temporary employees. I might even be on the review panel. How about that? What do you think? Good news, right?”

  He wondered if his boss was telling him this as a way of asking for a bribe, and the more he thought about it, the more confused he felt that he should be up for review at all, and he could not answer right away. He’d had no intention of becoming a permanen
t employee, so this was neither good nor bad news to him. Instead of answering, he coughed twice.

  “Are you taking medicine for that?”

  “It doesn’t go away, but it doesn’t stop me from working either.”

  “So it’s not necessarily cause for concern. Even if it is contagious.”

  “I do feel sorry that I might be spreading it.”

  He didn’t feel sorry at all. His boss patted him on the shoulder, looking unconvinced but also completely unconcerned, and left the changing room.

  The man stamped his time card and checked the bulletin board in the office. An enormous chart that filled nearly the entire wall displayed each day’s work posting. It took him a while to find his name. He was being sent to District 4.

  “I guess I won’t get to work with you today.”

  His partner, a younger employee, had appeared at his side. Each time they had been assigned to District 4, the man had swapped places with someone else.

  He had not been back there since leaving. Nevertheless, whenever he got off work late at night and discarded a bag of trash in a dumpster in a dark alley, and whenever he had no trash to throw away, whenever he saw a cat slinking around the dumpster and waiting for him to leave, and whenever there was no cat, whenever he smelled something foul and did not know where it was coming from, and whenever he smelled nothing at all, whenever cumulus clouds were floating in a clear blue sky, and whenever the sky was hazy and overcast, whenever he saw a vagrant loitering near a park or subway station, and whenever he saw immaculately dressed people strolling down a sidewalk, whenever he awoke in his new apartment with its single bedroom and kitchen and bathroom, and whenever he fell asleep in that apartment, whenever he very occasionally shut off the water somewhere so he could inspect the pipes and water tank and turned it back on only to have rusty water come pouring out, and whenever clear water tainted with nothing at all came out, whenever he ate from a tray in the company cafeteria, and whenever he ate lunch in a restaurant in the neighborhood he had been sent to work in that day, whenever he saw the knife that had been set next to his plate, and whenever there was no knife, in other words, at nearly every single moment of his life, he thought about District 4.

  His partner automatically started to walk away to ask their boss about switching districts, but he stopped him.

  “Today’s your lucky day,” he said. “No one knows that district better than I do.”

  His partner looked puzzled at first, but when he saw the playful look on the man’s face, he broke into a grin. As his partner began stuffing their tool bag with chemicals and equipment, the man let out a few hacking coughs. His partner paused and told him in a worried-sounding voice to go to the doctor. He nodded absentmindedly and lifted the bag to his right shoulder.

  District 4 was festooned with banners urging flu prevention. Each time the wind blew, the stiff fabric fluttered and snapped. The man noticed a few people wearing masks, but it appeared to be due to the usual seasonal flu rather than to the virus that’d had everyone on alert. The streets were pristine, not so much as a single dropped tissue. Smoking while walking was illegal, so there weren’t even the usual cigarette butts. He could not believe that those same streets had once been filled with trash and packed with single-occupant vehicles driven by people who refused to use public transportation, who ignored the traffic lights and laid on their horns nonstop and got into constant fender benders and fistfights over the pell-mell of tangled cars. Though none of it had been any fun at the time, it felt now like a joke that gets told over and over.

  It had not taken long for District 4 to return to normal. It was as if the epidemic had been nothing more than a rumor. People had done their part by maintaining a semblance of daily life even amid fear and uncertainty. After the epidemic subsided, almost everyone, excepting those who had died of illness and those who had run away for fear of illness, had returned to their usual places. The misfortunes brought on by the epidemic were now little more than personal problems.

  “You said you used to live around here?” his partner asked.

  He’d been gazing wistfully out the car window the whole time. He nodded slowly.

  “It was a small apartment building,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s still there.”

  “Of course it’s still there. Apartments might not survive as long as cockroaches do, but they’re still good for at least thirty years. Would you like to go check it out?”

  “We can’t loaf or we’ll be stuck working overtime.”

  His partner double-checked the address they’d been posted to and let out a low whistle.

  “Seems it’s your lucky day.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re working Sixth Street. That’s right nearby. We’re going to pass it anyway, so I’ll throw it in for you. To commemorate your visit.”

  The man watched quietly as his partner drove. The world outside the window looked different from what he had seen before, or what he thought he’d seen. This didn’t surprise him. He felt like he had already seen everything. After a moment, they saw the street sign for where his old apartment was located. The buildings zipped past. Everything looked too alike and, making matters worse, the lack of trash in the street made it impossible for him to find the building where he had lived for only a few days. His partner slowed the car without a word and drove up and down the block several times, but he could not pick out the building. If only there had been a light fog, some trash on the sidewalk, or a bad smell coming from somewhere, he might have remembered where his old apartment was and found it right away.

  “Let’s just go. It’s not like we’re going to park and get out.”

  “You seem disappointed.”

  “I’m not disappointed. I only lived here a few days.”

  “But you’re always talking about how good those days were.”

  “Well, come to think of it, now is better.”

  His partner looked at him and smiled, then steered the car toward their destination. According to the address, it was where the park that he had lived in was once located, but in its place now stood a megastore. The building had four levels underground, six floors aboveground, and a two-story parking garage. The first and second basement floors contained an enormous food court. The manager of the food court was the one who had called them.

  “We found a rat in the food storage. The employees went nuts. Then word got out to the customers, and we’ve had a real problem on our hands since then.”

  The heavyset manager dabbed at his face with a handkerchief already damp from the sweat that would not stop dripping.

  “Wasn’t this area originally a park?” he asked the manager.

  “That’s what they say, but I don’t know if it was really a park or just one big trash fire. Either way, it was covered in trash when construction began.”

  The manager suddenly lowered his voice and leaned in closer to the two of them.

  “I don’t know if you know, but wasn’t all of District 4 built on an old landfill? Maybe that’s why no matter how well we clean, there’s a smell that never seems to go away, and we even seem to get more rats than other places. Also, it feels like the ground is sinking. It makes me nervous. The land this store was built on used to be a park, but they burned trash right next to it, and the whole place ended up filled with garbage. Lots of homeless guys, too, and rats—it was filthy! The residents couldn’t take it anymore and finally asked the mayor to just get rid of the park entirely. And that trash fire . . . from what I hear, the homeless were sometimes thrown—”

  The manager abruptly stopped talking and stood up straight.

  “I’m sorry. Once I get to talking, it all just comes right out. Please excuse me.”

  The man’s partner said it was okay but didn’t hide the look of discomfort on his face. The man thought about the part the manager had left off. About what the vagrants did in the park and at the trash fire. In other words, what he had done.

  “It still embarrasses
me to think that we were all too scared to kill one little rat. Aren’t you two fellows afraid?”

  “If we were, how could we do this job?” the man’s partner said with a laugh.

  The man himself didn’t say anything. He was still terrified of rats. It had scared him in the beginning to think that he was no better off than a rat, and then later, killing rats was the only way to reassure himself that he was better off, and it frightened him that he spent every free minute hunting rats in pursuit of that relief. It was terrifying to know that he’d been led down this path by a chance encounter with a single rat, and he scared himself with his retaliatory desire to annihilate the rats that refused to die no matter how strong the poison or how vicious the lash.

  “Anyway, I’ll leave it in your hands. If you knew exactly how much that single rat cost us in sales, you’d be shocked.”

  After the manager finished showing them around and returned to his office, the man left his partner to inspect the sales floor once more and headed for the enormous warehouse next to the food court. He was pretty sure that was where the trash fire had been. The warehouse was filled with the smells of different foods; some were rotting, and the rotting things left their odor on the non-rotting things. He selected a potato from a nearby crate, rubbed it against his gray jumpsuit to wipe off the dirt, and sat on the floor and slowly scraped off the peel. The cold floor made him cough and brought back his headache, but he didn’t care. He bit into the flavorless potato.

  “Where did you go?”

  He heard his partner looking for him. He did not answer until he had swallowed every last bite of the potato. He was about to get up when he discovered a single small rat staring at him. He had no idea where it had come from. He knew that he had to defy his own fear and kill that filthy rat. If he moved as fast as he usually did, he might be able to catch it and kill it without having to use poison. But instead, he gazed in silent wonder at this rat that would find a way to survive no matter what. The rat stood still, as if debating which direction it ought to escape in. While he hesitated, the rat skillfully hid itself in the shadows near the wall, to return back along the same path it had come.