City of Ash and Red Read online

  The entry light shone down blankly on him as he scowled at the floor. He peered around at the dark hallway that had conspired in the loss of his suitcase and then walked to the left while scanning all eighteen of the apartments on the fourth floor. The motion detector lights mounted above each of the apartment numbers flicked on and off in turn as he passed them. He examined the bottoms of the doors closely to see if he could tell whether the occupants were awake, but not a single door had light leaking out from under it.

  After reaching the end of the hallway and returning to his own apartment, the man warily scrutinized several of his neighbor’s doors, each with a peephole set in the center like a single eye. The doors stared grimly back at him. During the brief time that he had been in his apartment, one of those doors had opened and someone had quietly sneaked out and carried his heavy suitcase inside. If they pulled it, he would have heard it dragging across the floor. It might have even left tracks in the carpet. Since there were no tracks and he had heard nothing, that meant they had to have picked it up, but the person would have to be big and strong to lift it so easily. That was the best he could infer from its disappearance.

  He scanned the closed doors one by one and tried to remember what he had packed—other than the weight of the world, that is. He had packed hastily the morning of his departure, so he could not remember for certain what was in there, but he had definitely grabbed some clothes and underwear. He must also have packed basic toiletries (though now he questioned whether he’d managed even that) and he recalled opening the shoe cabinet, which meant that he’d brought an extra pair of shoes. He had also stuffed in some CDs and DVDs that caught his eye, as well as a few books. The one fortunate thing was that the files he needed for the planning meeting were on his laptop, which he had brought in a separate bag along with a dictionary and his passport. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that he wasn’t really attached to anything he had packed. The suitcase that had seemed to carry the weight of the world was really nothing more than a collection of insignificant objects, only so much dead weight. Not having clothes to change into right away was inconvenient, but at least the things he lost could be easily purchased in Country C. He regretted losing the books, as they were in his mother tongue, but he figured it wouldn’t hurt to slowly read some books in the local language, for practice. As it turned out, none of the items that had weighed so heavily in his suitcase were irreplaceable. As long as he had the cash to buy them, that is.

  He felt a little down, not solely because of the lost suitcase, but because of the whole string of unfortunate events that had plagued him since his arrival. But he comforted himself with the thought that everything that had happened would serve as a talisman against future mishaps during his stay, and that they would make for funny anecdotes later, just as the inspector at the airport had said. He had a tendency to feel defeated and lose courage whenever things didn’t go his way, but he would dust himself off and pull himself together this time because he remembered that he had seen security cameras installed in all of the hallways when he first entered the building. He would ask the building superintendent for help, and once he’d had a look at the security tapes, he would find out who had taken his suitcase. Everything he thought he had lost would soon be returned to him. The worst thing he could do was jump to negative conclusions.

  Pessimism was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That was his first thought when he went back inside and realized that his cell phone was gone too. He had turned it off and put it in the suitcase along with the charger. The only phone numbers he had brought with him were stored in the phone. Getting in touch with friends back home wouldn’t be impossible, but it would require multiple, annoying rounds of long-distance calls. Not that he had any friends in particular that he spoke to regularly or made a point of touching base with. When he thought about how hard it would be to call anyone, he felt broken off from the rest of the world. If he failed to recover his phone, he would be cast out from the world of communication itself, just as his initial burst of pessimism had dictated.

  He tried hard to suppress those thoughts and kept telling himself that all he had really lost were some clothes and electronics, all easily replaceable. The more he repeated this to himself, the more he missed his old pajamas, and the more he wanted to pick up the phone and talk to someone, anyone at all. He would never get to sleep now without those pajamas, no matter how tired he was, and he wouldn’t be able to relax until he heard his mother tongue.

  His throat was parched. The water was undrinkable. The tap must not have been used in a long time, as rusty water kept pouring out. He took a bowl from the cupboard and placed it under the faucet, which gushed and spurted like the pipes were going to burst, waited for the rust to settle, and then carefully sipped the clean layer of water on top. He’d never had to drink rusty water before, except for one time as a child when he and his friends were messing around, and he remembered how even then he had rushed to rinse his mouth out. Nevertheless, he drank it as easily as if he had always been drinking rusty water. He filled several bowls, but still the water came out mixed with rust, and his thirst did not go away though he drank until his stomach was full.

  He lay on the bed, pulled the blanket up to his neck even though he wasn’t cold, and turned on the television. His head ached each time he thought about all he had lost; he knew he would have to do something about it. Since it was the middle of the night, most of the channels had colorful test patterns. Only one was still broadcasting the news.

  A reporter and a news anchor seated in a studio were having a heated exchange. The video footage they showed was as slow and choppy as a clip from an old movie. The quality was so bad that he guessed it had been filmed with a small handheld camera rather than a news camera.

  The camera panned aimlessly across some houses, then a large hospital suddenly came up on the screen. Men dressed in the same hazmat suits as the health inspectors at the airport were loading a stretcher covered with a white cloth into an ambulance. The cloth hung limply. It reminded him of a white flag raised by enemy troops surrendering in battle. Whatever was on the stretcher looked more like a corpse than a patient—the cloth was pulled all the way up over its face.

  Despite his attempts to focus on the news report, it kept getting interrupted by commercials. In contrast to the dismal and depressing news, the commercials were giddy and comical. Like premonitory symptoms of depression. Images of death were followed by a man seemingly excited to death by a swig of frothy beer. When the commercial ended, the screen changed back to the anchor grimly reporting the news, and after a moment, the exact same beer commercial came on again. The beer was called Zero and claimed to be the world’s first completely nonalcoholic beer. The commercial paid no mind to the man’s wondering why anyone would bother to drink a beer that would not get you drunk. Back and forth he went between the epochal-sounding birth announcement of a nonalcoholic beer and the doomsday-sounding news report of someone’s death, before he finally, suddenly slipped into sleep.

  THREE

  The world beyond the front door was filled with white vapor. The clouds seemed to have lost their hold on the sky and fallen to earth. A musty, acrid scent wafted toward him, as if to tell him these were no clouds. As the smell spread, the vapor, which had started off as thick and puffy as a giant cotton ball, slowly began to unravel. The man stepped outside to see a sprayer truck with a fogging unit attached to the back going around the corner of the park in a cloud of chemicals.

  He assumed the trash was the reason for fumigating. Not only were the streets littered, even the soil beneath the marble on which he stood was filled with garbage. The marble floor in the lobby gleamed. It looked like it was cleaned regularly. But when he thought about what lay beneath, he felt afraid. The earth threatened to rumble and rip open right beneath his feet.

  He stared at the unraveling cloud of vapor and dove headlong into the center of it, just as he used to do when he was a child playing behind the trucks that sprayed
for mosquitos. He would have chased after the truck too, if there had been at least one other person doing the same as him. The cloud thinned into a fine mist. The smell enveloped him. But the childhood memories conjured up by the smell were so banal that they made him more anxious than homesick. The disinfectant would not keep him safe from trash and disease; he could have doused himself from head to toe in its toxic brew and it still would not be enough to fend off the virus or keep that foul stench away from him.

  The sprayer truck circled the block again. The building superintendent was still not there. The man’s coughs came harder, probably brought on by the acrid chemical fog. He’d had a lot on his mind since his arrival, but the one thought that had stayed with him was the conviction that he had to hurry up and get over this cold. Growing impatient, he was about to leave, to look for a pharmacy instead, when a man dressed in a silver hazmat suit appeared. Half-hidden by the clouds of disinfectant, the man looked like a legless ghost.

  As the hazmat suit headed toward the superintendent’s office, the man shouted after him that he was the tenant who had moved into apartment number six on the fourth floor the night before. In his haste, he stumbled over his words. The hazmat suit sailed into the office, the door closing behind him, as if he had not heard him. Offended, the man went back into the building and rapped hard on the black curtained window of the office. The superintendent pulled the curtain back, visibly reluctant, but did not open the window.

  The man explained again that he was the new tenant. He raised his voice as he tried to tell the superintendent that he had set his suitcase down in the hallway the night before and, while his back was turned, someone had stolen it. But he wasn’t sure how to say “while my back was turned,” so he changed it to “after a while.” He was nervous. If the superintendent got impatient, the curtain might close before he was done speaking, and this made him stutter even more.

  The superintendent shook his head. He seemed to be saying he knew nothing about it. The man spoke more slowly, taking care not to get angry.

  “I know that you don’t know anything about it. But I think you should try to find out who took it.”

  He did his best to sound polite, though he frankly didn’t understand why he should bother. The superintendent continued to shake his head and say nothing. The man pointed to the security camera installed in the ceiling to indicate that he wanted to check the footage from the night before.

  “It’s broken.” At last, the superintendent spoke.

  The man stared at the ceiling in disbelief.

  “How long has it been broken?”

  “Broken. It’s broken.”

  As the man stood there staring at the ceiling with his eyebrows raised, he figured out why he felt so flustered and intimidated. The superintendent had a habit of scowling each time he said something, which made the man feel like he was being a pest and complaining for no reason.

  The superintendent scowled again and rattled off a long sentence that the man could not even begin to grasp—the only word that stood out was “pharmacy.” Was the superintendent saying that he’d just come from a pharmacy and that was why he hadn’t been at his post during working hours? Or was he advising the man to go to a pharmacy? The superintendent repeated the sentence over and over and then shut the black curtain as if to say he had no further reason to continue talking. The man banged and banged on the door, but the curtain did not open a second time.

  Thick clouds of pesticide flocked through the streets. The sharp smell of the chemicals stung the man’s nose. But at least it was an improvement on the stink of garbage that had assaulted him the night before. His situation had not improved in the slightest, but the smell had.

  When the chemical fog finally lifted, the trash-filled streets revealed themselves again. Maybe it was because of the trash, but there were almost no pedestrians on the sidewalks. The only people who caught his eye were police officers wearing hazmat suits over their uniforms. In fact, almost everyone he had seen so far wore one of the suits: the health inspectors and medical examiners, the superintendent, the police. He had no doubt it was due to the virus. Uncollected garbage could make people sick, but nobody would wear one of those suits just for that. Each time he saw someone wearing a protective suit or a dust mask, he worried that the virus might be spreading faster than he’d thought and he felt defenseless and afraid.

  The roads, on the other hand, were badly congested. Most of the cars had only one person in them, and the few buses that he saw were empty, as if they were all simultaneously arriving at their terminus. Traffic was so snarled, rendering the traffic lights ineffective, that the sprayer trucks, which never ceased their assigned rounds, abandoned the jammed roads and drove on the sidewalks instead. Now and then, a car would follow a sprayer truck and drive shamelessly up onto the sidewalk too, but they were immediately pulled over by the police out on patrol. Police cars raced down the sidewalks in pursuit, sirens wailing, and forced the errant cars back onto the road. Driving on the sidewalk was hardly any faster though, as the drivers had to plow through mountains of refuse, trash flying out to the sides like it had been hit with a backhoe or exploding under the tires like firecrackers.

  The sprayer trucks left behind a thin layer of powdery disinfectant that coated the sidewalks. The man’s feet kicked up flurries of the stuff. He had no idea where to find a pharmacy. He had his mind on cold medicine, but what he really wanted was one of those puffy suits. He didn’t know how effective they were at preventing infectious diseases, but to his eyes, they looked as good as armor.

  He left the main street, which was backed up with cars, and ducked down a side street. It, too, was clogged with garbage, but there was much less car noise. He thought to himself it would be nice to find a place to eat, but nothing was open. There weren’t even any other pedestrians whom he could ask about nearby restaurants. When he had made his way down several side streets and emerged onto another main road, he came across a small pharmacy. He nearly walked right by—it was tucked out of sight between two larger buildings. He ran toward it, narrowly avoiding a car that had just driven onto the sidewalk. Fortunately, the security gate was raised, which seemed to mean the pharmacy was open, though the lights were turned off inside.

  As he drew closer, he saw that the plate glass window in front had been smashed. The little shop was in ruins, as if a massive earthquake had struck there, and only there, in the middle of the night. A flower planter out front had spilled its soil, and a fallen tree stretched its thick branches imploringly toward the door. The window display was empty. It looked like it had been given a violent shake: the drawers were hanging open, and empty medicine boxes were strewn across the floor. Shards of glass were everywhere, crackling underfoot with each step. A woman inside the pharmacy was sweeping broken glass into a dustpan. Judging by the easy way she moved inside the shop, which was still dark despite the morning light that found its way in, he assumed she was the pharmacist.

  Though he knew he could just step inside, he stood clear of the destroyed shop and called out to her that he was looking for cold medicine and a hazmat suit. She kept her eyes on the broom and ignored him.

  Just then, a large stone flew close to where he was standing and shattered what was left of the plate glass window. Any closer and it would have hit him. The pharmacist ducked behind the counter, looking shocked. As the man ran to put distance between him and the building, he realized what had happened: other people had been by earlier, putting rocks through the window and ransacking the shelves. The rock thrower stepped into the pharmacy carefully, to avoid hurting himself on the long, uneven shards. His unusual air of caution made him look like he was the one who had narrowly avoided being hit with a rock rather than the one who had done the throwing. The man slowly crept back as the pharmacist poked her head above the counter. He watched as she stood face to face with the rock thrower, who glared at her and loudly ordered her to do something, his face looking anxious and hunted. He seemed exhausted, as if he had been carryin
g that rock a long way, searching for something, or looking for something to steal.

  The pharmacist took it calmly. It was a shame, but she seemed to know that the man was not there to hurt her and that, despite the damage done to her pharmacy, there was really no one whom she could blame. Her face was surprisingly serene. It might have been a look of resignation, but she seemed at ease, perhaps because there was nothing left for her to protect. If you have nothing to lose, you have nothing to fear. Discouraged by the pharmacist’s cool demeanor, the rock thrower gave a half-hearted glance around the store. Unless he needed cardboard boxes, there was nothing to take. He left, still empty-handed.

  After the rock thrower left, the pharmacist came out from behind the counter, picked up the rock from the floor, and tossed it outside. The rock rolled weakly across the street and stopped against a black garbage bag. The pharmacist asked the man what he wanted. He knew from looking at the shelves that there was no point, as there was almost nothing left in the way of medicine, but he told her he was looking for cold pills and a hazmat suit, if only to give her an answer.

  “I will pay you. I am not a thief,” he said.

  The pharmacist burst into laughter.

  “That’s a funny-sounding accent,” she said. “I take it you’re a foreigner? I could ask the same of you: Got any medicine I could buy?” She looked at him and laughed again. “You can see for yourself that I’ve got nothing. Someone already cleaned me out. They didn’t even know what they were grabbing and took pesticides as well. But there is some bug spray and rat poison left.”