City of Ash and Red Read online

  The examiner also presented his black suitcase with the baggage label still attached, and said something that the man interpreted as “thank you for your cooperation” and either “take care” or “work hard.” He took the suitcase with a smile. Cooperate and work hard. That was exactly what he wanted to do.

  At last, he entered Country C.

  TWO

  The smell. It was so foul that it forced itself all the way to the bottom of his lungs and rattled his intestines. He gagged before he could get the taxi door open. The driver pulled to a hasty stop in front of the bridge. The man leaped out of the cab and vomited on the curb, long strands of sticky saliva dangling from his mouth, while the cab driver, who still needed to be paid, stood off to one side and covered his masked mouth with a gloved hand to keep from breathing in the stench. As soon as the man was able to staunch his nausea and pay him, the driver sped away, as if he dared not stay a moment longer.

  The man had a difficult time catching a cab at the airport. That is, he had gotten one right away at the taxi stand. But the driver took one look at the address on the slip of paper the man showed him and sternly shook his head. Several times, the man got into a cab only to have to get right back out again, and was even refused a ride before he’d gotten the door open. It did not take long for him to realize that all of the drivers were trying to avoid District 4, where both his company and his apartment were located. Every city had its places where the roads were very narrow, or the road signs were bad, or the road conditions themselves were terrible, or there were few people around, making it unlikely for a taxi driver to get a return fare. The man thought District 4 might be one of those places.

  Instead, District 4 turned out to be a lone island created from reclaimed land during the building of a river levee on the outskirts of City Y, the capital of Country C. It was connected to the mainland by several long bridges that spanned the river. But during construction, it was discovered that the island had been built on top of buried industrial waste and household garbage, and the politician who had backed the project was kicked out of office and his political career ended. As rumors spread that the island, first intended as a posh commuter suburb for the capital, was in fact a landfill, the land price plummeted, the market value crashed, and most of the residents fled. In the aftermath, it was converted into a business park with relatively affordable rents, and for that same reason, residents had slowly begun to return.

  At the airport, the man had been starting to wonder if he would have to stay in a hotel instead, and he told himself he would try just one more taxi. This time, the driver took the slip of paper with the address on it and gave the man a long-winded explanation that he could not follow. The driver spoke slowly and had to repeat himself several times, but the man finally understood that the driver was telling him he could not go all the way to the address but could drop him off somewhere close. He had no idea how close was close, but he figured, once there, he could catch another taxi the rest of the way. He nodded in consent.

  During the ride, the driver listened grimly to the news on the radio and did not say a single word to him. The news alternated between the urgent voices of an announcer and a reporter on scene who sounded like they were reporting the same story over and over. They talked so fast that it was safe to say the man understood exactly none of it. But that meant he could sit back and listen indifferently to the unfamiliar language as if it were only so much music and gaze out at Country C submerged in darkness. His face floated like a ghost against the lights of the city speeding past outside the window. A ghost—a disembodied being that hides its true existence. That seemed like just the right word to describe his presence in that city.

  He had left his coworkers, with whom he had had a falling out because they thought he had been granted special favors, and he had left his ex-wife, who had practically become a stranger to him despite having once been his closest friend, to come to this place, in the mood for a fresh start, confident everything would go his way, as one receiving the gift of a new life. But each time he thought about his home country, the premonition that he would never again set foot on native soil rushed over him, and he felt that he had been banished rather than having left of his own free will. His heart pounded from the muddled sensation of being an outcast and the pride of starting a new life. As the taxi passed through the dark center of the city, he raised his hand and pressed it against his strangely racing heart.

  The bridge was so long that he couldn’t see where it ended. The other side lay buried in shadow, as if it had been lopped in half, making it look dangerous to cross. He stared for a moment at the silent bridge, deserted of cars and pedestrians. Somewhere in the dark at the other end lay the apartment where he would live and the head office where he would work. There, too, was the him that had bidden farewell to his old exhausting life, and the him that would enjoy a vibrant solitary life with new foreign coworkers. His only regret was that all of it lay on the other side of a darkness that was as black as pitch.

  He waited, but when it became clear that no other taxis were coming, he picked up his bag with one hand and wheeled his suitcase behind him. He had not packed much, but his suitcase felt heavy, as if it contained the whole world. He began crossing the bridge over the tarry water. If it weren’t for the trash drifting downstream—the surface of the water was littered with garbage, as though a flood had torn through recently—he might have mistaken the river for a stagnant, festering swamp. The cab driver had dropped him off nearby as promised; according to the map Mol had sent, the bridge was an access road into District 4.

  He had barely managed to stop his insides from churning and was almost across the bridge when he discovered the source of the smell. Piles of garbage were stacked at the end of the bridge, built up in layers like the floors of a building. What he thought in the dark was a signboard standing in front of a shop turned out to be trash, and the long building that looked like a squat military barrack in the distance turned out to be a line of dozens upon dozens of garbage bags. He didn’t have to wonder long about what was scattered all over the streets, as that too was trash. There was trash everywhere—in the places he could see, of course, but also in the places he couldn’t readily see. The foul odor was coming from all of that neglected trash, and the same black soup that trickled out of the garbage also oozed out of the pavement and leaked up from deep inside the earth, where the old trash lay buried.

  He had heard once about a city that had problems with trash. Not here, but in some other country, a city famous for its beautiful harbor. The landfills had become saturated and sanitation workers went on strike over political issues. The uncollected garbage was left to rot in the middle of a historic city. Decomposing trash stank up the streets and spewed toxic gas, making residents ill and corroding the city’s ancient ruins. A protest rally was held, and the government responded with brute force, turning the peaceful demonstration into a bloody melee. Riot police with metal batons and citizens wielding picket signs clashed among the teetering piles of garbage. Not far from the streets where the demonstrators were spilling their blood was the harbor. Seen from afar, the harbor was as pretty as a postcard. White sails bobbed gently in the breeze. But up close, the water’s surface was covered with trash. Litter surrounded the sailboats and spread wide like long shadows. Maybe, the man thought, District 4 was going through the same situation.

  Just as he was passing the seemingly endless row of garbage, one of the wheels on his suitcase, which had been wobbling and shaking the whole time, finally broke off. The tiny wheel rolled smoothly away and disappeared into the mountain of garbage. He decided to drag the suitcase rather than look for the wheel. The trash bags seemed to be moving and he could hear something that sounded like panting. There were probably cats and dogs and countless packs of rats digging through the garbage. They would not go hungry in this city.

  Between his broken suitcase and his bag, he had no free hand to plug his nose with and had to keep breathing in the stench. But it help
ed him get used to the terrible smell that had tied his intestines into knots. He even stopped to look over a display of fake food in the window of a closed restaurant. Despite the trash littering the streets and the evil stench coming from it, the sight of that fake food made him ache with hunger.

  All of the shops were closed. The man had read somewhere that the city council had passed a law preventing businesses in City Y from staying open past eight at night. Quality of life outweighed shopkeepers’ right to survive. In fact, everyone who lived there was obligated to do more than just maintain a livelihood but to work to improve the quality of their individual lives. City Y demanded a certain level of refinement from its citizens, and for that to happen, everyone had to be guaranteed a certain amount of leisure time, regardless of the inconvenience or financial losses incurred. Though, of course, some businesses found ways to skirt the law.

  The man wondered how anyone could enjoy a quality life amid this foul stench, and he questioned whether giving people leisure time automatically made them culturally refined, but ever since getting out of the cab and walking, he had realized that once you were inside the smell you stopped noticing it. Leaving the trash to sit uncollected for so long was a bold statement of the sanitation workers’ rights to a quality life. Even in a city festering with garbage, a city that reeked, it was only right that everyone should enjoy a little human dignity. Walking on top of the garbage strewn across the sidewalk on the way to his new apartment, the man thought, as long as he was in Country C, he too would soon enjoy compulsory leisure, cultural refinement, and a dignified life, and he began to cheer up.

  The apartment building crouched in the dark like a big, gentle dog. Relieved to have finally arrived, he set his bags down for a moment and looked up. The night sky was narrow and dark, making the roof of the twenty-five-story building look like it was being sucked into the mouth of a deep, black well. As he stood there, head tilted back, the darkness swallowed the building inch by inch.

  He got off the elevator at the fourth floor and slid the keycard into the lock for apartment number six. The lock clicked open. He wanted so badly to lie down that his legs shook. His arm, which ached from dragging the broken suitcase, had turned stiff and numb. He left the suitcase in the hallway, stepped inside, and inserted the keycard into the wall slot to turn on the electricity. After a brief pause, the lights flickered on to reveal a single room, kitchenette, and bathroom—a typical bachelor apartment.

  He was about to remove his shoes when a telephone rang. The sound of it gave him a start. He hadn’t known the apartment even came with a telephone and of course wasn’t expecting any calls. But he figured it must be the building superintendent checking to see that he had moved in, or else it was Mol, calling to find out whether he had arrived yet, so he hurriedly kicked his shoes off and thumped across the floor to grab the phone.

  Just as he had thought, it was Mol. Mol spoke slowly, using short sentences and relatively simple words, to allow for the man’s tentative grasp of the language, and purely for that reason, the man was able to catch most of what was said. Mol briefly consoled him on the fatigue of travel and the trouble he had gone through, what with being detained and all, and then hesitated, as if gearing up to ask the man a difficult favor, and finally said it would be good if he did not come into work for the time being. The man took this to mean that Mol wanted him to rest for a few days, as there would no doubt be a great deal of paperwork to process now that he was in the country. He welcomed the news, and yet something in the way Mol hesitated made him uneasy.

  “Then, when should I come in?” he asked.

  “We’ll hold an internal meeting to decide that.”

  Mol added that it shouldn’t be more than a week to ten days. The man felt he ought to double-check what he had heard—the fact that he couldn’t follow the language, even on the simplest of subjects, vexed him—so he echoed the words, “A week to ten days?”

  “Nothing is confirmed yet,” Mol responded. “It will depend on the outcome of the meeting.”

  Mol said that something had to be decided first among the managers. The man missed the first part of what Mol said, so he had no clue what exactly it was that had to be decided. He asked Mol to repeat it, but Mol told him he would call again after the meeting, assured him it would be held soon, and said they could discuss the matter then. Mol’s response was so vague and open-ended that there was nothing for the man to repeat back to him.

  He stalled for time, trying to drum up the words and sentences he needed in order to ask the things he wanted to ask and get the response he wanted to hear. But no matter how hard he tried, he realized that with his limited language abilities he had no choice but to leave it all to chance.

  Mol must have felt more explanation was needed, because he added that the problem rested with Country C’s peculiar situation. He said it would be a week at the latest until he could get back to the man with a decision. The man thought Mol said, “as long as there’s nothing out of the ordinary,” but he could just as easily have said, “as this is out of the ordinary.”

  He felt both relieved and anxious. The words, “at the latest,” made him feel better. That meant nothing had changed about his work assignment. And if the words he had not quite caught at the end were indeed “as this is out of the ordinary,” then that probably referred to him being asked to take a week to ten days off before starting work. “Country C’s peculiar situation,” on the other hand, made him uneasy. The country was facing both a garbage crisis and a spreading epidemic, and that would make it hard for anyone, even citizens, to feel at ease.

  His curiosity left unsatisfied, the man exchanged several rounds of “thank you” and “sorry to inconvenience you,” with Mol tacking on so many extra closing greetings that the man couldn’t figure out when to hang up, before finally ending the call. As he was setting the phone back in its cradle, he realized he should have asked for Mol’s phone number. He didn’t even know his own phone number for the apartment. He picked up the receiver and stared helplessly at it. The dial tone buzzed peacefully and evenly, not caring one bit that he didn’t know the number. The tone was more or less the same as the dial tone back in his home country. But now that he could only receive calls and not reach out to anyone himself, the sound struck him as unfamiliar, and it finally sunk in that he was in a strange apartment in a foreign country.

  Ever since he had been selected for the transfer to the head office—a temporary detachment that was to include management training—the deal had been on the verge of falling through. That had been the case up until the surprise email one week ago instructing him to leave the country. At first, his start date had merely been pushed back, and then, right around the time they started re-discussing the date of his transfer, the political situation in Country C went into abrupt turmoil. The long-reigning conservative party had been taking its power too far, and citizens were expected to rise up en masse. But in the end, there were only small, sporadic demonstrations that fizzled out as soon as they began. Elections took place despite the unrest, and the incumbent conservative party enjoyed an easy victory.

  Then, when they were renegotiating his transfer date, rumors spread that a major earthquake was going to hit Country C. Located at the juncture of two tectonic plates, Country C was always on the verge of a quake, and geological societies around the world had predicted several different dates for a major one, based on certain warning signs. The dates of their predictions came and went without so much as a tremble, but the man’s boss, the branch manager himself, prevented him from leaving because he had lost a cousin a few years earlier to an earthquake that struck the capital, right where the man was to be dispatched. If that one-in-a-million chance occurred and a dispatched employee was injured, the paperwork for processing his medical compensation would be very complicated indeed.

  By the time his new transfer date was scheduled, the executives at the head office abroad had grown skeptical. Their concern was that it would be management training in nam
e only, and that the real intention was to siphon off the head office’s technology and expertise so the branch office could break away and go independent. Some were of the opinion that none of the branch employees were ready for a management position. The man’s scheduled departure date grew closer and closer, but some of the executives remained unyielding in their opposition.

  The only ones pushing for the transfer were the branch manager and a small handful of the manager’s close associates at the head office, who had little say over the matter. While the final decision was being deferred, the man learned that the only reason the branch manager, who was close to retiring, had stubbornly insisted on naming a transfer employee despite opposition from the head office was so he could shore up his own position in the company. The man also learned that, despite his assurances that the transfer would happen, the branch manager lacked the power, drive, and necessary connections to realize his ambitions.

  And so the transfer kept getting postponed, but this did not calm the ripples of discontent among his coworkers over the fact that the man had been selected for it in the first place. The most indignant was Trout—who had earned that nickname because his eyes were so wide-set that they made him look like a fish—and several coworkers who sided with Trout. Everyone felt that if anyone were to be made branch manager, it ought to be Trout, as he was the oldest and most experienced. They also thought that if anyone should be sent to the head office for management training, that person, too, should be Trout. Of course, even if seniority were not an issue and everyone had been hired at the same time, someone would still have to be promoted over the others, but they all felt the wrong man had been chosen.