City of Ash and Red Read online

  After much time had passed, following the visit to the megastore, the man used the same method he had figured out once before to call Yujin’s office. He did it on impulse. He’d been alone in the office one day when the gray telephone on the metal desk rang. It had been a long time since he’d picked up a telephone. The person on the other end asked for the contact information of one of the employees, saying they were old friends. After telling the person he could not give out that information, he felt an unbearable urge to place a call to somewhere.

  Just as before, the employee in the human resources department at Yujin’s workplace sounded friendly at first but soon made it clear that his inquiry was unwelcome and told the man he could not give out that number. The man told the employee that it was a long-distance international call from Country C. He added that he had lost contact with Yujin, having left their home country long ago. Just as before, the employee felt obligated to look up the phone number for him. But in the end, it could not be found. There were several employees listed by the name of Yujin, but none of them had been born in the right year or graduated from the right college. The man asked if the employee could check whether Yujin had resigned, but the voice on the other end turned adamant again and informed him that such information could not be given out, and hung up.

  Later still, he had called information, simply to hear his mother tongue again. At the operator’s high-pitched insistence, he helplessly blurted out the first name that came to mind: his ex-wife’s. The operator repeated her name back to him and asked which city. He hesitated for a moment and named the city district where they had lived right after they got married. After a brief pause, a recorded announcement said, “The number you are trying to reach is not in service. Please check the number and dial again.” He called information again and repeated his ex-wife’s name. When the operator asked which city, he named the city district where Yujin had lived. As before, he had to listen to a recording telling him that the number he was trying to reach did not exist. He tried several rounds of this, giving his wife’s name and naming different places he knew. After frittering away several days at this task, he finally came across a phone number registered to her name.

  For a long time, he carried the number with him on a scrap of paper everywhere he went. He knew quite well that the unfamiliar combination of numbers written on the paper could not possibly belong to his ex-wife. Nevertheless, whenever he had a free moment, he took it out and studied it, and only when the creases from where he had folded the paper were tattered and torn did he finally dial the number. It rang several times, but no one answered. When he set the phone back down in its cradle, he remembered how his ex-wife had deliberately ignored his calls for a while after their divorce, and he felt hurt all over again. The next time, he tried calling late at night. A man answered. Drawn by the familiar sound of his mother tongue, he slowly said his ex-wife’s name.

  “Who’s calling?”

  The voice on the other end sounded impatient and full of suspicion, like they might hang up immediately if the caller did not reveal himself at once. He said he was an old friend.

  “She’s not here right now.”

  He assumed from his tone that the other man was lying. The longer the other man refused to put her on the phone, the more obsessed he became with talking to her, as if the woman on the other end, this person with the same name as his ex-wife, were his ex-wife herself. He pleaded with the man, saying that he just had to speak with her. The man on the other end stayed on the phone—he must have wanted to know who this mystery caller was. But when his voice turned tearful, the man on the other end grew impatient and hung up. He dialed the number again right away, but no one answered, and when he dialed the next day, someone picked up and listened just long enough to confirm that it was his voice and then hung up. When he tried the number again a few days later, a recorded message informed him that the number he was trying to reach was no longer in service.

  He dropped by his old company headquarters. Like the phone calls, he did it on a whim. He happened to be in the area on a job. The whole neighborhood had been designated as a Special Global Zone: different companies with branch offices all around the world were located there, and the business hotels nearby were booming. The pest control company he worked for serviced several hotels in the area.

  Just as before, the lobby was staffed by three guards (though he could not tell if they were the same guards) all standing at ease with their hands behind their backs. He had his partner wait outside while he went in. He asked the first security guard who met his eye how he might go about meeting with one of the employees. The guard asked with a friendly smile for the name and department. He named Mol’s department, but the guard tilted his head at him and pointed out the company directory posted on the wall: there was no such department. He no longer had to fill out a meeting request form, but the new system only allowed him into the building after speaking directly with an employee over the phone. He had no choice but to admit to the guard that while he did want to meet Mol, he knew nothing else about Mol other than the department he had once worked in. After going through the company directory page by page, the guard informed him that the name Mol was so common, there were seven different employees by that name. The man’s pitiful expression did not waver, so the guard was kind enough to allow him to call each number in turn. He dialed all seven Mols one after the other and explained that he had been transferred there from abroad long ago. Each replied that they knew nothing about any overseas transfers. After having the exact same conversation with all seven Mols, he politely thanked the guard for his help. The guard seemed to appreciate his courteousness—he pointed to the name of the pest control company stitched on his jumpsuit and asked if he worked there. When he nodded, the guard said that the company was looking into selecting an exterminator and asked for a business card. He took a card from the front pocket of his bag and handed it to the guard, who laughed. The name on the business card read Mol. He looked at the guard and let out a hollow laugh, as if the whole thing had been a joke.

  After failing at every long-distance call, he resolved not to make any more calls to anywhere or anyone. The resolution did not last long. Whenever he was on his way home late at night after work, feeling like at any moment he might come across a rat in some darkened alley, he would rush to the nearest phone booth, lit up as brightly as a lighthouse. He chose them because they were the only brightly lit things around. Inside that narrow glass box, he would pick up the receiver and speak aloud whichever names came to mind. His ex-wife’s name. Yujin’s name. His own name. The receiver, which made no sound, not even a dial tone, unless he inserted a coin, listened quietly to the names he spoke. His voice echoed gently inside the glass box. Those names were his sole connection to a distant, unreachable past.

  He sometimes raced off to phone booths in the middle of the day, too, whenever he was spraying the places that rats liked to travel and stumbled across one that had emerged before the rest of its colony and died. Phone booths were the only place where he could be completely alone. He called the old branch office where he used to work as well. Someone always answered before the end of the first ring. He would be too busy trying to identify their voice to say anything himself. The voice of the person on the other end was different each time, and he could never picture who it was. He did not know if this was because so much time had passed, or because he had never heard those voices before. He had watched the seasons change and return, had seen the epidemic spread like bushfire and settle into ash, had witnessed healthy new shoots sprout from that ash and grow thick and wild. And he had watched again as the threat of new epidemics were forewarned and warnings gave way to short-lived fear. But fear did not last. Those who believed that the only fallback was to remember past experience and keep a grip on reality continued to maintain their daily lives, which were so identical to their lives before the epidemic, so utterly unchanged and only slightly less comfortable now, as to negate the supposed deadliness of the vir
us. Meanwhile, much time had passed, which meant it only stood to reason that new employees would have been hired. While debating who he should ask to be transferred to, he would find himself feeling bewitched by the kindness of those unfamiliar voices, and would end up giving his own name every time. Most asked him to repeat the name. Perhaps they thought they had misheard him. He would carefully sound out his name syllable by syllable only to be told, “I’m sorry, but there is no such person.”

  He kept calling because he thought that if only someone who used to know him would answer, they might say, “That person is no longer with the company.” And if that happened, he could hang up, happy in the knowledge that he had just conversed, however briefly, with someone who knew him. But each time he called, he was asked to repeat his name and was told, “I’m sorry, but there is no such person.” It happened so many times that he hung up without feeling disappointed.

  If Trout had answered (once, he felt the urge to give Trout’s name instead, but in the end he gave his own name anyway), he would have greeted him, but that never happened in all of the calls he made. If Trout had been made branch manager as he had hoped—as they all had hoped—then he would not have been able to get a hold of him without going through Trout’s secretary first.

  “Were you making another call?” his partner asked as he put his dust mask back on.

  “Yeah, I guess I was.”

  “You should just install a phone booth in your apartment.”

  “Can I do that?”

  “Actually, your place already has one!”

  His partner laughed and pointed at him. His partner had nicknamed him Booth after his habit of ducking into phone booths when they were supposed to be working or right after they were done. The man liked the nickname. The first time his partner had teased him about it, he was reminded that the word for public phone in his mother tongue was a homonym for in the air. It was true. He was a man suspended in thin air, a man airborne.

  But this time he could tell from his partner’s half-joking complaint that he would have to stop making calls. He fitted his industrial-strength dust mask firmly over his nose and mouth and pressed the button on the sprayer nozzle. The smell of pesticide made him cough. The coughing didn’t stop, so he lifted his free hand to his masked mouth. When he did that, the sprayer hose bent toward him, and the pesticide that had been pooled inside the hose poured out onto his head and dripped down his face. His exposed skin smarted from the bitter-smelling chemicals. The smell alone was almost enough to bring tears to his eyes. But he held back the tears and set down the container of pesticide that he’d had strapped to one shoulder, removed his mask, and blew his congested nose as hard as he could. His partner gave him a sympathetic look. He smiled at his partner through tear-filled eyes and decided he would have to stop by the megastore in his old district, to pick up something for dinner.