Hattie said, “It’s hard to have a no-good foster brother. You hang in there and recover, lance your boils. And guess what? Next time you get to see someone special. Santa Claus!”
The medicines were kicking in and Patsy started to say something but slurred the words like a demoralized tape recorder. Woo-jin hastily ate his peanut butter, sticking his mouth up with it. Hattie said, “Let’s get out of this cesspool,” then left with Things One and Two, who carted away ice chests packed with harvested tissues. The VCR still played images of happy people engaged in healthy outdoor recreation, breathing the salty ocean breezes on a catamaran or taking in the foliage on a misty mountain trail. Woo-jin slipped in another spoonful of peanut butter and this seemed to represent the tipping point of his mouth’s mobility. He might as well have eaten cement. He could no longer move it at all. A line of buttery drool trickled down his chin. Patsy, for her part, had become more debilitated on the couch, her sagging and bruised form occasionally hiccuping as she settled, asleep, to dream of sea turtles and Neptune, who called to the sea nymphs with his conch-shell megaphone. Hattie and co. peeled out from the dirt driveway in their van. Woo-jin stood in the living room, his mouth immobilized. He knew he had to return to the dead girl.
The steady clang of machines hypnotized Woo-jin as he left the trailer that morning, jar of peanut butter in one hand, spoon in the other, his mind still carbonated from the ennui attack, feet taking him around the crumbling brick buildings of Georgetown to the edge of Boeing Field, where planes roared and dipped like immense predatory birds. Oh, if only some action hero of yore were to give Woo-jin a pep talk and reinforce his nerves as he walked through the grasses, retracing his path to where a police helicopter now sat, its blades spinning lazy-like, slower and slower as if the thing was nodding off to sleep. Three or four cops were gathered around the fridge-like contraption, taking pictures, spitting profanities into walkie-talkies, drinking coffee, a clump of vaguely authoritative-looking humans in nonetheless shabby police uniforms. This was like a TV version of something that was actually happening, an instantaneous reenactment in which the original experiencers of an event immediately reexperience their experiences for the cameras and fake their initial reactions. Woo-jin stuffed another goopy wad of peanut butter nervously into his mouth. He came to the congregation of officers—two men, one woman, a helicopter pilot smoking a cigarette—and raised his spoon-holding hand as if wishing to be called upon to speak.
“Who the hell’s this guy?” said an officer with a wide head topped with a flattop. Another, a skinny tall man drinking a short coffee, nodded at Woo-jin. “You know anything about this?”
“Wooolmph mmmr,” Woo-jin said. “Wwrrmmth hmmph.”
“What are we waiting for?” said the skinny tall one. “Get this fellow a glass of milk!”
“I’ve got some milk in the bird,” the pilot said, and quickly located some two-percent and a glass, which he filled with a steady hand. The glass was translucent brown and pebbly and would not have looked out of place neglected behind a sectional in the Midwest. Woo-jin nodded his appreciation, consumed the refreshing glass of milk, smacked his lips a few times, and said, “I saw the body last night. Coming through the field.”
“That’s nice,” the wide-head cop said.
“I saw her when I came through looking for cans and eating my three-quarters of a burger. She had face bugs!”
Woo-jin couldn’t see the body from where he was standing. It was hidden behind that big green thing. The officers frowned like they suddenly remembered they had work to do. The woman cop rolled her eyes. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that yanked up her eyebrows.
The skinny tall one said, “Well, thanks, but we have it covered here.”
“But I saw her. It made me puke. Who is she? Am I under arrest?”
“You’re not under arrest,” said the chopper pilot. “Can I have my glass back, please?”
Woo-jin handed back the glass, now frosted with milk film.
“We’ve got lots of work to do here, so you best be on yer way,” the woman cop said.
“So you don’t think I killed her?”
Laffs all around. “Hoo boy. No, we’re pretty certain you didn’t kill her,” wide-head snorted.
“We could book you anyway, if it would make you feel better,” skinny cop said, to his colleagues’ guffaws.
“Who is she?” Woo-jin asked.
“You mean the body?” skinny tall said. “We haven’t gotten that far yet. We just got here.”
Woo-jin said, “I want to help find the killer.”
More laughter, louder this time.
“The killer!” the chopper pilot snorted.
“Find him!” the woman cop laughed.
Nervously, Woo-jin started in again with the peanut butter, goops and goops of it shoved at the tooth-ringed hole in his head. “Woolf,” he said.
“Get the guy more milk,” wide-head said. The chopper pilot refilled the glass and handed it over. Woo-jin drank as enthusiastically as before.
“Thank you. I really could help you guys find the killer.”
“Get the hell out of here,” skinny tall said.
Woo-jin, upset but not really understanding why, decided to push his way through space by walking. Time to go to work anyway. The ground scrolled beneath him with its broken pieces of crud, rodent carcasses, pebbles, fibers, the granularity of byproducts. He crossed the oily Duwamish into the ruins of South Park, ghosts of Mexican restaurants and a store where cell phones once were sold, Sunday circular advertisements pushed along by an underperforming wind. This was the shortcut he took to the staging area in West Seattle. A cat trotted in front of him with something purple in its mouth that didn’t look like food, and Woo-jin realized the thing hanging out of its mouth was part of its mouth, and the cat looked at him as if it rightly understood Woo-jin had nothing at all to offer it. Woo-jin wondered briefly about the people who used to live in this neighborhood and their broken empathies. Their absence struck him like the musty sweet odor from a discarded cola bottle. Why, by the way, hadn’t the cops taken him up on his offer to assist with the dead body? They’d seemed more interested in standing around looking cool than investigating the appearance of a dead girl in a field above which airplanes screamed. Time and again Woo-jin butted up against the intelligence of other people, the walls of confusion from which they peered down on him and leered. In times of fresh panic he wondered if he might be even stupider than he suspected he was, and maybe these smiling case workers and librarians and such noticed deficiencies in his brain that he himself could not begin to appreciate due to the fact of his being somehow fundamentally flawed in that department. Maybe their occasional kindnesses were a way of humoring him. Maybe he wasn’t even smart enough to see their secret cruelties.
There were dilapidated houses and something that used to be a gas station, structures absent of human life, remnants of foundations, charred heaps of cracked wood and bricks, as Woo-jin came to the parts of the neighborhood reclaimed by the trees. Trees pushed up through the concrete in what was once the middle of the street, birds clinging to branches, watching. The road became a path, and the path disappeared into weeds and thicket, but Woo-jin knew the way. He emerged onto a sidewalk and spotted the revolving sign of his employer, Il Italian Joint, a hundred paces away.
Il Italian Joint mostly served the workers going to and from the New York Alki staging area and it was Woo-jin’s job to make sure the pots were clean. Great quantities of soups and sauces bubbled in these pots and, once emptied, they needed to be scrubbed. The heat baked a thin, nearly impenetrable layer of food to the bottoms of the pots, which Woo-jin attacked with a number of scrapers, wools, soaps, and picks, chiseling the solidified minestrone or marinara until the pots gleamed silver. He wondered on occasion if it was possible for the food to chemically fuse into a new sort of compound with the steel. Maybe the cooking process became so intense that it negated the difference between the organic food material and the ore-based material that constituted the pot and the only way to truly clean a pot would be to actually scrape away layers of metal at the bottom. His implements seemed inadequate for the task. He scraped and sweated over the pots and never really got one to the clean state of his satisfaction. Each pot it seemed he polished to a level of just-adequate cleanliness. He fantasized about sandblasting them.