Woo-jin ate. The sandwiches were a perfect harmonization of condiments, cheeses, vegetables, and meats. One of them had this incredible pesto aioli. After finishing three sandwiches Woo-jin bit into the snappy apple. Dang! That was one fine piece of fruit. Finally, the cookies. Just the right chewiness, with chunks of chocolate, raisins, and cashews. At the end of his meal, Woo-jin stuffed his trash into the cookie bag and tossed it on the fire. While he’d been eating he’d forgotten about his troubles but now, under the cosmos, on what seemed like a vast soundstage, he wondered about the dead girl and if he was somehow responsible for her turning up dead twice. He was beginning to miss Patsy. And where was he supposed to live?
Woo-jin turned to the pile of books. He knew how to read well enough, how to get trapped in sentences and scratch out some words when needed, thanks to the various foster parents who’d made sure he didn’t die and made him learn to read so they could keep collecting the foster-care checks. From time to time an older kid, somebody smarter, had read him a book and he recalled the reassuring process of blobs of ink turning into flapping lips and tongues. The book on top of the stack was a paperback without a cover, its pages yellow and blunted at the corners, eroded by sandy wind. He kicked it aside and looked at the book beneath it. He read the title once and read it again.
Funny there’d be a book by another Woo-jin Kan. He picked it up and turned it over and looked at the picture of the author, a guy who looked kind of like himself but older, spiky hair gray-flecked, slightly smiling, a peaceful expression. He looked like the kind of guy who had his shit together, clue number one that this was a different Woo-jin.
He turned the book back over and opened it to the first page.
Dear Woo-jin,
This is your future brain sending a message to your past brain. For serious. Here’s what you have to do to get Patsy back. You have to write this book you’re now holding. It’s one of the only books the Last Dude has to read, so make it really good. He needs to read your book so that he can make the messages about why we got extinct. He’s writing them out in the rocks down there in the desert. You have to quit your dishwashing job and write this book. What’s the book supposed to be about? Who knows, you haven’t written it yet, but at least you have a title ha ha ha.
You think I’m joking? Since I’m your future brain I know what’s about to happen to you. You’re going to find that dead girl again. What I say is true and you really have to follow these directions. Seriously, bro.
P.S.: For serious. You have to quit Il Italian Joint and become a full-time writer.
As Woo-jin’s eyes turned from the page to the sky, his mind got sucked back through some sorta tube, flailing, a squeal of astral velocity, as if he were recoiling from the strange fact of reading something yet to be. His head went smack against the ground as the day began anew in Georgetown, Seattle. There was the women’s hosiery advertisement again, now drained of emotional oomph. Woo-jin’s tracksuit was filthy. He stood, twisting the kinks from his joints, mouth painfully dry, hair flat on one side of his head and cantilevered in perpendicular spikes on the other and sort of fuzzed-up on top. He stepped over the cinder block where the door used to be and shuffled in a direction that seemed to have been chosen for him. His legs snapped back and forth and walked him through a playground nestled between an off-ramp and some train tracks. A cargo plane scraped the wind.
Woo-jin spoke a sentence through streams of spittle. “I want to figure out what’s going on here.” Speaking aloud surprised him. Like a thought had escaped his brain through a hole in a fence, scampering out into the open where ears could pick it up. If he had a celestial head like the Ambassador, that certainly would have been convenient. He would just ask his celestial head, “Hey, fill me in on what the deal is with the dead girl and this dusty place with the campfire with the refrigerator, books, stuffed animals, and a mirror. Oh, and the tire. And Patsy being yanked up into the sky. And my future brain, who says I’m supposed to be an author.” His celestial head—he imagined him as a gap-toothed black man with an afro—would say, “Thanks for asking. Here’s exactly what those things mean, my brother,” and proceed to untangle the knot in Woo-jin’s brain that seemed only to grow tighter the more he picked at it.
Now beyond the playground and its ghost children frolicking on dirty equipment, Woo-jin came to a concentration of warehouses, inside of which were squirts and clanks and whatnot, noises supposedly connected to purposes. Coming to the corner of 12th and Vale he found the Ambassador sitting on a milk crate with his toilet brush scepter.
Woo-jin said, “You ever heard of a book called How to Love People, by Woo-jin Kan?”
“I don’t have time for books like that when I’m always consuming economics and political science texts,” said the Ambassador. “Unless this love book of yours is an economics book. In that case, yes, yes, I’ve most definitely read it.”
“Maybe it is about economics.”
“I thought you said you wrote it.”
“Another Woo-jin Kan wrote it. Or maybe it isn’t a real book at all.”
“In that case,” said the Ambassador, “you might try getting it published.”
“That’s a really good idea.”
Was it afternoon already? Looked like it. Soon it would be time for work again, the nightly river of flatware and crockery. A metro bus pulled up smelling of french fries, biodiesel. The Ambassador gently touched Woo-jin’s shoulder with his toilet brush scepter and said, “Someday soon you’ll witness the most epic peace talks in human history,” then boarded the bus and asked the driver if it stopped near Rite Aid.
Woo-jin walked to the lot just north of Boeing Field where the body had appeared and appeared again. His legs carried him beyond the field, through South Park and up the road to Il Italian Joint. When he came to the back entrance he found piles of dishes literally spilling out the doorway into the parking lot. Thousands of them, encrusted from lunch rush. At first he stepped over them but the closer he got to the kitchen the harder it became to not break anything. He quickly found that the best way to navigate the dishes was to get prone and sort of swim through them. In the kitchen, the dishes reached a little higher than head level. With a modified breaststroke Woo-jin was able to keep his head above the line and edge closer to where the wash station was supposed to be.