City of Ash and Red Read online

  He looked down expectantly at his bruised palm and forearms, the soreness now all but faded, as if they might tell him something. It was possible the bruises meant he’d had something to do with his ex-wife’s death, just as the police conjectured. But then it occurred to him that he’d forgotten to leave his address in his voice mail to Yujin, and yet Yujin had gone straight there. The only person who knew that address was his ex-wife, and she was already dead by then. Yujin had never been to his apartment before, had not asked how to get there, and had not been told. The man wondered how he had found it at all.

  What if that night, after the man blacked out, Yujin, who was relatively sober, had helped him home? What if in his drunken state he had called his ex-wife and demanded that she come over? And though it wouldn’t have been what he had in mind to do, what if he had laid into her when she showed up, and blamed her for all of their failures? What if all three of them had started bickering because of that? And what if, at the end of all that bickering, secrets were revealed and, unable to bear the pain caused by those secrets, one of them had grabbed a knife?

  There was the problem, too, of the knife, which was said to have been stained with her blood and supposedly found in the compost bin of his apartment building. He hated taking out the compost. The bins were always disgusting, the air stank for several feet around them, and cats were always jumping out at him when he least expected it. After the divorce, he’d gone to great lengths to avoid generating any food waste. When it could not be helped, he would wrap his leftover food in a plastic bag and throw it away surreptitiously in the trash can in front of the convenience store on his way to work instead. In fact, he wasn’t even entirely sure where the compost bin was. So, if the knife had been thrown away, it must have been Yujin who did it. Besides, on the morning of his departure, he was rushing from room to room, packing his bags, and yet he had not seen his wife’s body. He’d been in too much of a hurry to go through the entire apartment, but there was no way he could have missed the smell of blood or any other signs of foul play. If his ex-wife died in his apartment, then it had to have happened after he left the country.

  He kept thinking that someone like Yujin was definitely capable of killing his ex-wife, but that, on the other hand, not even Yujin was capable of that. Yujin was impatient, was prone to flying off the handle and verbally lashing out, had a habit of clenching his fists to work off his anger, and had aimed those fists at others on more than one occasion. The man had personally witnessed Yujin’s fists flying through the air at other people, and had found himself on the receiving end. If Yujin had found out that he and his ex-wife were still sleeping together after their divorce, he would not have taken it well. It may have been a cliché to be cuckolded by your wife and your best friend, but it wasn’t so funny once it happened to you. That said, killing someone was completely different from swinging a fist, breaking a window, tossing a chair, or lashing out with words. Even someone who couldn’t control his anger and assaulted people out of habit was not necessarily a killer. Yujin may have been quick to explode with rage, but he was not so cruel as to stab a person over and over.

  Having finished his clumsy detective work, the man shook his head. Regardless of whether he or Yujin was the culprit, there was no way he could have blacked it out so completely, no matter how much he’d drunk that night. This wasn’t some childhood nightmare that you forgot once you were all grown up. You didn’t forget a thing like that.

  He grabbed some of his rationed bread and chewed it slowly. It was sweet. His sense of taste bothered him. How could bread still taste sweet at a time like this? But he tore off pieces of the hard bread with his teeth anyway, took his time chewing, and swallowed it slowly, bite by bite. That was all he could do for now to keep himself alive.

  He recalled that while he was drunk he had been clutching something in his hand the same way he was now clutching the bag of bread. That had to be where the bruise on his palm had come from. The last piece of bread that he had so optimistically put in his mouth got stuck in his throat, and he finally had to spit it out. What was in his hand that night? He couldn’t be sure. This was not a problem of memory but of sensation.

  He walked around the house, picking up things that he might have held that night: a heavy ballpoint pen, a rolled-up notebook, a hard leather pencil case, wooden chopsticks. All sorts of items, one after the other. Then, though he did not want to, he took the kitchen knife out of the sink and squeezed the handle. When he gripped the curved handle of the knife, his palm trembled, as if recognizing a feeling that was at once strange and familiar. Fearful of that tremor, he released his grip. The knife fell to the floor.

  The dropped knife was as stiff as the look on his face. He opened and closed his empty hand. Just because the knife had felt familiar, just because he could still feel it in his hand, just because his hand remembered the exact sensation of it, did not mean that he had stabbed his ex-wife. Knife handles were all the same, any one of them would feel familiar at first. But regardless of the truth, the moment he picked up the knife and let it fall, the moment that uncanny tremor ran through his body, he felt the world coming toward him, a world as cold as a blade and as blunt as the heel of a knife.

  The doorbell rang. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and in fact he’d never even heard the doorbell before, so it took several rings before he realized the sound was coming from his own apartment. Slowly and carefully, so as not to make a sound, he tiptoed over and looked through the peephole. Three men were standing in a semicircle, blocking the door. All three were dressed in street clothes and wore dust masks.

  He assumed they were from the disaster management headquarters, visiting him as part of the quarantine procedures. The police had said the apartment building was on lockdown so that they could determine which of the residents were infected and take them to a separate center for treatment. On the afternoon of the first day of quarantine, he’d had blood drawn so they could test him for infection. They had told him the results would take a while, but maybe they were ready early. Or maybe the men were here because of his quarantine in the airport. The public health inspector there had told him not to leave his place of sojourn as they might visit him for a follow-up diagnosis. But they could also be detectives who had come to arrest the prime suspect in a murder case. They would have figured out right away where he was, and Country C had an extradition treaty with his home country.

  “Who’s there?”

  He checked to make sure the door was locked before slowly walking over to the balcony and calling out in his native language. One of the men standing outside said his name. His name was difficult for foreigners to pronounce, especially for people from Country C, but the person outside not only understood him but also enunciated his name clearly. It had to be someone from the same country as him. They could have been from the company, but no one at the head office spoke his mother tongue fluently, and if they had to contact him, they would have used the phone. If this was to inform him of the results of his blood test or because something had been added to the quarantine procedure, then it would be a local health inspector, someone dressed in a hazmat suit, someone unable to pronounce his name correctly.

  The three men pounded on the door and called out his name with perfect pronunciation. If he went with them back to his home country, with these men he was assuming were detectives, he would lose any chance to prove his innocence. He was a suspect, but he was not guilty. He could still feel the knife in his hand, but he knew he had not used it. And yet that was secondary. The main problem before him was the fact that he was their prime suspect. It was childish, wishful thinking for him to hope they would know he was innocent simply because he was.

  He opened the balcony door and looked down. A sprayer truck must have just passed by: clouds of disinfectant roiled up from below. Crows flew past in the dark and lowering sky. He couldn’t see the ground through all that vapor, but he knew it would be piled high with black garbage bags giving off their vile yet familiar stench. Th
ey would break his fall. It was better than not knowing whether anything was down there at all, better than jumping with blind hope. The moment was so brief. He had no time to think or decide, pushed only by the instinctive fear that said he must not get caught. But he believed there was more to what he did next than simply his not being a criminal. Though he did not know it yet, he would have to suffer for a very long time the disillusionment of knowing that, in the end, he alone had reduced himself to garbage. He heard a keycard slide into the lock. They must have gotten it from the building superintendent. The deadbolt would slow them for a moment, but soon that too would slide open. Just as the door swung wide, he stifled another cough and leapt into the garbage below.

  ONE

  In his home country, the man was a product developer at a pest control firm. Despite the job title, he didn’t actually research and develop products himself. All he really did was take the pesticides created at their company headquarters abroad, run safety checks to ensure they met local quality standards, and prepare new product launches. Their products were highly toxic. The basic principle behind the company’s rodenticide had not changed since its first iteration fifty years ago, but the toxicity had grown and grown. And yet rats refused to go extinct.

  The human endeavor known as rat-catching may as well be called a history of failure. The more powerful the toxins, the thicker the coveralls and the more fearsome the gas masks were that you had to wear each time you used them. Experts offered up one idea after another for catching rats, but all they gained was the realization that the harder they tried to eradicate them, the more likely they were to end up hurting people instead. Of course, the bright ideas those experts came up with were to spray rats with the rabies virus or intentionally spread the bubonic plague, effectively killing rats, yes, but taking down far more people in the process.

  The commonly used term for the one who administered the pesticide was “exterminator” and the industry itself was referred to as “extermination,” but those names presented problems. They raised customers’ expectations too high, gave false hope that pests could be eliminated completely. Rats, in particular, cannot be exterminated. If it can be wiped out with mere poison or traps, then it’s not a rat to begin with.

  Once you know how rats spend their time, the reason for this becomes clear. Rats devote their lives to propagating the species. It is their sole act of production. They can mate dozens of times a day, and a female rat can birth a new litter every month, churning out over a hundred pups a year. They can turn any place into their own territory, and it takes only a single female for them to colonize.

  After “extermination” fell out of favor, most companies went through several name changes before landing on the current “pest control” and “environmental hygiene.” Specialized terms like “rat catcher” were useless because environmental hygiene and pest control does not select for a single species but rather targets all pests at the same time. And they had to consider the clients’ point of view. “Environmental hygiene” had a satisfying ring to it that assured customers they were leaving the matter in the hands of experts, whereas “rat catcher” was unpleasant and conjured up images of unsanitary working conditions. Say the word “hygiene” and you picture a freshly scrubbed kitchen sink; say the words “rat catcher” and you picture a dirty bathroom drain, a sewer.

  Nevertheless, aside from routine pest control for homes and apartments, the man’s company’s biggest problem was still rats. One look at the company logo was enough to tell: a red circle with a slash through it enclosed a dark, evil-looking rat with its teeth bared. The logo practically screamed annihilation of rat-kind.

  In the early days, those who specialized in killing rats had only clumsy tools at their disposal—clubs and sticks, or large traps that slammed shut at the slightest touch. They crawled into places no one else cared to enter: dank basements, dust-filled attics, filthy storage sheds where towering piles of odds and ends threatened to topple over and bury them. Today’s rat catchers no longer have to stalk alleyways after dark, barehanded or swinging long clubs, while they wait for a rat to randomly scurry out. Certainly no need to practice playing the pipe. Luring rats into a river to drown by twiddling on a magic pipe only happens in storybooks.

  You might question whether cities are truly so overrun with rats that they require an entire profession dedicated to the task, but no matter where you are, there are always more rats than you think. It’s a mistake to assume that because you’ve never seen a rat at home, there are none. Rats can be found in places where they have been spotted, where they’ve never been spotted, and even where you think they couldn’t possibly ever be spotted. They are anywhere and everywhere.

  We think of a city as an aboveground space made up externally of buildings and homes and bridges and all manner of shops, but it is also a hidden, underground space of sewer tunnels and conduits for buried power lines. These conduits are the rats’ alleyways. If aboveground is the world of people, then below is the world of rats. The deep structure of the city resembles a distribution chart of its teeming rodent population.

  But while every city is full of rats, you won’t spot them just anywhere. In all but the most unusual of cases, rats will not walk down the sidewalk in broad daylight. They will not because they have not. Rats take only familiar roads, most of which are secluded paths, dark alleys. Everything looks different from the other side.

  Sprawling parks and luxurious flowerbeds. Tiny parks and cramped flowerpots. Dirt yards of abandoned houses. Well-kept gardens and lawns. Basements stuffed with belongings. Under floorboards. In the sewer. Under old furniture. Inside rolled up carpets. Anywhere that looks like a hole or a pit is where the rat makes its home. Even in the subway stations used by thousands of people every day, rats coolly seek out the dark places beneath the tracks and in the tunnels to line their nests.

  If you have ever spotted a rat where you live, then know that forty-eight more were hiding just out of sight. Or fifty-six. Or sixty-seven. In fact, whatever your least favorite two or three-digit number is (the higher the number, the likelier the odds) that’s the number you should think of. But the exact count doesn’t really matter. You will never catch every hidden rat. What matters is knowing there are far more rats than the ones you actually see. So, if you think catching the one rat that you can see is difficult, don’t even dream of catching the countless hidden others. It is not a problem of numbers. It is a problem of power. The rat that you see is always the weakest of its colony. It is too weak to find food on its own turf—that is, in your basements and subway tunnels, in your sewers and buried conduits—and are forced to venture out into the unknown in search of food. If you can’t catch them, then what makes you think you could catch the others?

  The truth is, rats die all the time without the help of exterminators. City rats die for as many different reasons as people die. They get run over in the street, or sucked up drainpipes by toilet plungers and drown. Some are snatched up by birds, and some, despite living in a trash-strewn city, fail at finding food and simply starve.

  Rats sometimes die in traps, but their pathological dislike of the unknown makes this method difficult. Rats are intensely conservative and suspicious of anything new or unfamiliar. Poison is far more common. Poison shuts down the rat’s body and makes it unable to digest food. Blood circulation to the lungs slows, and the rats drag themselves out of the dark and into the bright outdoors in search of air. Poison also has the advantage of killing a large number at one time. And yet, while countless rats can be slain in this fashion, the effect is transitory. No matter what poison you use, there will always be rats that develop a resistance. There are even rats that can survive the destruction of an entire colony. There always are. For the minority that survives, their fertility rate skyrockets. And less competition for food means they get bigger, stronger. So the harder you try to eradicate them, the better an environment you create for the survivors. Threats of extinction only strengthen the species.

  It
is the same for humans. No virus can kill the entire population. Even if 99.99 percent of people were to die, the survivors who have natural immunity would live. Epidemics are like rat poison: they strengthen the race by leaving behind only the strongest rats. And just like rats, the human species is not easily exterminated.

  The garbage dump is at its most beautiful when the garbage is on fire. Particularly in the early mornings, when a thin fog or faint clouds of fumigant still hang in the air, the glow rising from the trash is as beautiful as a sunset on a clear day. The fire blooms a dusky rose, the color complementing the clean morning air. It starts off a bit hazy, but the color gradually clarifies until it bursts into full flame, black smoke belching forth. The smoke that rises when everything in the world burns. Going up in smoke along with the household garbage discarded by the city’s inhabitants are the rats that get picked up with the garbage and cannot escape the pyre, as well as corpses that can no longer be accommodated at the hospital and are secretly discarded in the middle of the night (or so rumors would have it) and the infected who are not yet dead but are already as good as dead (as those rumors would have it). As the fire dies down, the last anemic embers flare when a breeze passes over them and then burn down to nothing, and petals of dark ash are carried on the wind.

  After the smoke clears, milky clouds of fumigant mix with the ash and blanket the park. Because of the regular, unceasing intervals of fumigation, the world is always this milky white, as if a veil has been drawn over everything. The constant spraying is the city’s sole response to the epidemic. By the time the spray settles, it is the middle of the night or very early, just before dawn, and the park is too dark to make out anything anyway.