“What do you mean, suffer? What are you doing to him?”
“We are doing nothing to him. We simply introduced a particular reality he was occupying to a different reality. He will experience some physical pain but, again, I promise you, he’ll end up okay.”
“Why are you doing this to me? What did I do to you people?”
“It feels like some kind of revenge thing, doesn’t it? It’s confusing, and it’s supposed to be. By the way, we paid off your student loans.”
“Who cares about my loans? Tell me where Rocco is!”
“Something’s been nagging me as I’ve been talking to you. Again, I keep referring to ‘realities’ but that strikes me as an overly simplistic way to describe what we’re working with. When I speak of a reality I am really describing the way a particular consciousness or group of consciousnesses encounters matter. Further, how these consciousnesses choose to imagine new configurations of this matter. That’s really the state at which a metaphor of a history museum turns into an art museum. See?”
“I’m coming to Vancouver and I’m going to find Rocco. And after I find Rocco I’m going to find you.”
Usually there’s some sort of explanation for how two people get from one place to another but in this case there really isn’t. One moment Woo-jin and Abby were standing in the morgue with Dr. Farmer, talking to Dirk Bickle on a mobile phone fished from the mouth of one of the dead Abbys. Next they were under a new city’s rain, Woo-jin shivering beneath a plastic tarp in an alley off Robson Street, Abby back at her apartment watching a show.
The passing of garbage trucks and the roaring of clouds for a time comprised the entirety of Woo-jin’s world. A pizza joint’s garbage fed him and discarded pizza boxes provided him with blank pages onto which he wrote his book. He slept in the loading bay of a furniture store on shipping blankets, rose with the sun, and wrote until dusk under a fire escape. In the way that only small, forgotten places can, this smelly and wet alley came to represent the entirety of the universe. At night, through the gauze of light pollution, stars billions of years dead reminded the writer of the futility of his pursuit. He suspected he was an insect in the scheme of things, something to be scraped off the sole of a shoe. But the course of action his meaninglessness implied, to do absolutely nothing, would have caused great offense to the dude at the end of the world and his mystical refrigerator. The dude needed reading material. So Woo-jin wrote.
How are we supposed to love people? To get a handle on the question Woo-jin broke the book into chapters: “How to Love People Who Yell at You,” “How to Love People Who Can’t Wash Dishes,” “How to Love People Who Throw Things at You in the Street.” Was there anyone else he was supposed to love? Oh, right: “How to Love Dead People Who Suddenly Appear Back to Life.”
Woo-jin had yet to return to the mesa at the end of the world or wherever the heck it was. The ennui attacks arrived less frequently now, triggered mostly by weeping faces in magazines, but when they struck they struck more suddenly. These skull-rattling brain fucks tended to show up without a warm-up act. One morning he crumpled on the trash-strewn concrete, vibrating with hideous sadness over a lost-cat poster, thrashing and spitting and eating his own teeth. Somebody wheeled up on a tricycle. When the worst of the tremors had passed Woo-jin was able to open an eye and stare at the spokes, the tire, the rubber-bulbed horn. On the tricycle sat a child with an oversized head and fluffy gray eyebrows. Really the only childlike thing about him was his pudgy body stuffed into red OshKosh B’gosh overalls. In his plump little hand he held a kid-sized Jamba Juice. At the drink’s noisy conclusion he tossed the cup into an open garbage bin. Woo-jin asked this person what he wanted.
“I’m Pangolin,” the person said inside Woo-jin’s mind, the reception a bit scratchy. “I came to show you something.”
Woo-jin coughed snot.
Pangolin climbed off his tricycle and as best he could helped Woo-jin stand, then hopped back on the trike and asked him to follow. They exited the alley, one pedaling, the other limping, tracing a spidery route through the city to the industrial outskirts, past long-ago billboards proclaiming extinct pleasures, to factories dilapidated and overgrown with trees. A creek trickled from the warehouse where Pangolin parked next to other miniature-sized vehicles—bikes, scooters, toy SUVs. He ushered Woo-jin through a doorway. Inside, in vast acreage where stacks of consumer goods had once risen to the rafters, artificial hills speckled with wildflowers undulated. As they traversed this landscape contained within a building, other wee folk emerged from underground burrows through little doors.
“What do you people do here?” Woo-jin asked.
“We’re software engineers,” Pangolin replied. “Some people call us monks. We provide solutions.”
They climbed a hill where a tree grew high enough to brush the ceiling. It was an ancient apple tree, its arthritically twisted trunk creaking and groaning, bark scabbed and scarred. Over the course of a minute the tree blossomed, grew, dropped its fruit, shed its leaves, then blossomed once again as the fallen apples and leaves decomposed to dust. Over and over before Woo-jin’s eyes it repeated this cycle.
“This is our qputer,” Pangolin said. “To install the software patch you have to eat a piece of fruit after it has ripened but before it rots. Go, eat.”
Woo-jin held out his hand and caught an apple. He hesitated, then brought it to his lips. By the time he bit into it the fruit had turned to mush.
“Spit it out,” commanded Pangolin. “That data’s corrupted. You have to eat it faster.”
The next apple Woo-jin quickly bit, chewed, and swallowed. It tasted like any apple. “What is this apple supposed to do?”
“Provide you with a nutritious snack and fix some known bugs,” Pangolin said. “Now you’ll need to return to your alley to get your manuscript, then leave Vancouver as soon as you can before you get DJed.”
“Where am I supposed to go?”
Pangolin shook his head like he was exasperated at having to spell it all out. “Where do you think? New York Alki. You need to find a publisher for your book. Here, take my card in case you have any tech-support issues.”
Pangolin led Woo-jin down the hill, past another qputer monk who was bringing a trembling old blind woman to the tree. As they came to the door, Woo-jin asked, “What about my sister Patsy? Am I going to find her?”
Pangolin shrugged. “Beats me. I’m just a support tech rep.”
Across town, inside her steel and glass cocoon, Abby sat on the couch in her underwear and a T-shirt with no bra, watching a show. She couldn’t remember how long she’d been like this and couldn’t think to try to remember. It was just her body and her show in a room that dimmed with the falling sun and glowed faintly in daylight. There was a refrigerator full of food; Rocco must have gone shopping before he went wherever it was he’d gone. The cabinets were stocked with instant noodles. She ate, defecated, urinated, and watched television. In the early days, television stations went dead at a certain hour and the screen would fill with an image of a fluttering flag. A recording of the national anthem would spizz out of the mono speaker. Abby envied those late-night TV watchers of yesteryear who’d gotten to witness the terminus of a transmission. Slouched in their living rooms with their Funyuns and lukewarm Pepsi in giveaway tumblers decorated with the Hamburglar. The idea that a signal could end. To stare into the linty fuzz allegedly representing a visual echo of the Big Bang. As soon as this show ended, Abby was going to get dressed and find Rocco. Yeah, right. This show was too good. She’d gotten sucked in. Here was Neethan Jordan, strutting up Hollywood Boulevard on the red carpet. A guitar riff looped over the footage, something sharp or flat and nasty that came from four guys in Sweden. It was the kind of music that made you think this Neethan Jordan guy was a menace to society. Better lock up your children ’cause he’s out to corrupt them with his magnificently erogenous body parts. Neethan’s feet strode across the field of red fabric running alongside the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Names scrolled beneath his strutting shoes: Anatole Litvak, Jetta Goudal, Sabu, Nita Naldi. Breaking the fourth wall, Neethan turned to the camera and said, “I don’t know if I’m in my head, in a computer, or in a world that’s actually real!” Cars passed in what looked to Abby like an old-school video toaster montage—a sedan full of gaping, fanged clowns, a grainy Zapruder-film town car convertible with JFK waving from the back seat moments prior to his assassination, an ice-cream man dressed as a carrot leaning out of his window offering Fudgsicles, a gaggle of rambunctious exploitation flick Hell’s Angels. This wasn’t the physical world Hollywood Boulevard, if such a place had ever existed, but some kind of lazy, received idea of it. The red carpet led Neethan to the intersection of North Curson. A gas station, palm trees, abandoned cars. The red path veered to the right, north, into the hills. Here and there the husk of a house. Neethan’s breathing was amplified now, signifying exertion and panic. The sun dropped. A white cat skittered up, considered him for a moment, then dashed into some bushes. Scattered tabloid news rags and hip-hop-branded forty-ouncers across the carpet’s path. All these mansions, shuttered and dormant, gardens overgrown, vines snaking up gates and walls, curling around visionless security cameras mounted on poles. Individuals whose names used to appear in the credits of things that cost $100 million to make once lived here. A palm jutted up through the pavement in the middle of the street. Abby scratched her pubis: scritch scritch. The camera considered the sunset and the onset of utter darkness.