“Bahn Kan? Ben O’Winn? Pontoon?” he called. “Sandford?”
Apart from some indeterminate hydraulic hissing, the kitchen was empty of noise. Sandford Deane’s head popped up beside him from under a platter, wearing a colander for a hat.
“Thank God you’re here, Woo-jin. Pontoon, Bahn Kan, and Ben O’Winn didn’t show up. It’s up to you to turn this place around,” Sandford said, wiping a soggy crust of bread off his forehead. “I even got you some diamond-encrusted platinum wool.”
Woo-jin paddled over to the Hobart and got down to business. As he shoved dishes through the machine the dish level slowly began to drop. Midway through his shift the dishes were only up to his calves. Tirelessly, he converted dirty dishes into clean ones, an act of prestidigitation as much as sanitization. Dinner rush came and went and by the end of the night the wash station was empty. Woo-jin dunked his apron into the laundry and grabbed his card to punch out. Sandford clapped him on the back, congratulating him on another evening for the record books.
“Thanks, Sandford. But I won’t be back tomorrow. I’m quitting right now.”
Woo-jin’s boss looked aghast. “But you’re the best dishwasher in Seattle. In the world, even. What will you do instead?”
“I’m going to write a book,” said Woo-jin. “A book about how to love people.”
Sandford shook his head and retrieved the gold medal from the Restaurant and Hotel Management Olympics then solemnly placed it around Woo-jin’s neck. It looked good with the tracksuit even though the tracksuit looked like shit. Woo-jin stood a moment imagining a national anthem, not the new one, but the old one, the one with the terrorists getting castrated in front of their weeping children. How many hours had he spent in this kitchen, blasting caked-on food off porcelain surfaces? It had been his first and only job, started almost two-thirds of his life ago. He imagined a montage to go along with the national anthem, a series of slow-motion shots of him scouring pots and scraping baking sheets, drinking soda, punching his time card. All those good times seemed a prelude to this, the decision to write a book, which apparently he was going to have to figure out how to do. On the way out past the Dumpsters, Sally the waitress hugged him and said, “Good luck, Mike. We’ll say we knew you when.”
Woo-jin had no idea what she was talking about but he didn’t let on. He walked into the backdrop of New York Alki rising amid northwestern cedars, helicopters swooping and jets crisscrossing the clouds, past trembling warehouses, across the sludgy Duwamish, into the only neighborhood he had ever loved, Georgetown, coming to the field where he had twice discovered a girl’s body. He was going to write a book! He almost skipped at the thought.
Up ahead was the big unknown machine’s silhouette in the dark waves of grasses, like a sea-tossed dinghy weathering a storm. Woo-jin came to the indeterminate and aban-doned technology and looked to the place where he’d found the body.
There she was again.
The same girl, in the same place, in the same position. Same black hair, white shirt, black pants. Woo-jin leaned over and puked, witnessing the remnants of the sandwiches, apple, and cookies he had devoured on the wind-battered mesa the night before, introduced into this particular plane of reality. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked again.
The girl grabbed his arm and screamed, “Help me! Help me! Help me!”
Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 1
The tape roll a bit here before we get… Luke? You need anything, Luke?
No, I’m fine.
I thought we could first talk about Nick Fedderly. About when he was a kid.
Sure. I first met Nick in kindergarten. Everyone knew he was poor. When he came to birthday parties nobody expected him to bring a present. When he came to one of mine he gave me a used Mad magazine, which was a big deal. The money he saved up to buy it. He lived with his mom—her name was Star—in what was basically a shack out in the woods on Bainbridge, in a place we all called Hippie Hill. This was before the real estate boom of the eighties and nineties. The island was back-to-the-landers, some berry farmers, very simple living. You got to Nick’s house on a narrow road through the trees. It was almost like there was no ditch, just enough room for one car. And no gravel, just rutted mud. Steep. If it was raining, forget it. But at the top of the hill the drive opened into a little meadow with the shack. Smoke coming out of a stovepipe. At the edge of the property was the frame of a house that Nick’s father had started building but died before finishing. In the shack they didn’t have any electricity or gas heat and they cooked all their meals on a woodstove. His mom always looked exhausted. She would have been in her twenties but looked twenty years older. She wore stained housedresses and Holly Hobbie bonnets, her hair in thick, flower-child braid pigtails. It was just the two of them.
How did Nick’s father die?
He died trying to build that house. Apparently he was working on it one day and fell. There’s a right way and a wrong way to land. Apparently he landed in precisely the wrong way. This tragedy was pretty fresh when I first met Nick. I think I sat behind him the first day of class.
Did you two become friends immediately, or…?
Not really. Friendships are fickle at that age, or at least they were for me. Part of it I think is that I wasn’t ready for him yet. I hadn’t grown in the ways I needed to in order to really get to know him.
Star. What did she do exactly?
Odds and ends. She sometimes sold chicks and ducklings at the feed store. Split lumber. Janitorial stuff. Nothing too noteworthy or dignified. Poor Star. I think she tried to get jobs at restaurants as a waitress but she was always so wrecked-looking. I remember grown-ups talking in low voices about her fitness as a parent. They’d see Nick show up at school without shoes. I think they mostly lived off the insurance payout they got after Nick’s dad died. They kept living that same life up there in the woods in the shack with no electricity, an honest-to-god outhouse out back, the rain coming down hard turning everything to mud. Naturally everyone thought she was completely insane.
Did you ever go over to Nick’s house?
Sure, once we started playing together. This would be second grade. I rode my bike to school and one morning my chain blew out, so I had to walk it the last half mile. When some of the bigger kids saw me they laughed and made fun of me and I guess Nick heard about it. I parked my bike in the rack behind the gym thinking I’d have to have my mom come pick me up. But that afternoon I found that my bike had been fixed. Another kid told me he’d seen Nick messing with it at recess. The next day I confronted him about it, asked if he’d been the one who fixed the bike. He wouldn’t look me in the eyes, just sort of sank down into himself and stared at hopscotch markings. I finally got him to admit that he’d repaired it and I gave him a Superman trading card as thanks. He just pocketed it and ran away.
A while later I was assigned to be his reading buddy. We were supposed to read the same book and talk about it together in front of the class. We read some kind of science fiction story, I don’t remember what it was, but I remember he started to open up a bit. He didn’t get to see many movies, so I’d tell him the plots and highlights of the ones I’d seen. He didn’t have a TV or a telephone at home, which amazed me. Not having a phone, more than not having clothes, equaled abject poverty to me.