“I looked in amazement at all I had written down. The next day I purchased and staffed this embassy. And now I await further instructions.”
Woo-jin said, “Do you know where I could catch a bus to get to Il Italian Joint? My shift starts soon.”
The Ambassador rose grunting from his chair. “I’ll have my driver transport you. Pierre!”
Pierre appeared: short guy, pasty complexion, snappy outfit. He looked like someone who’d been convinced erroneously that he was a chauffeur when he was actually hired to kind of pretend to be one. He bowed deeply and waved his gloved hand in the direction of the front door. Woo-jin thanked his host for the shower and the new clothes and the food. He ached to get back to the steam and suds of his wash station.
After a short ride in a comedian’s idea of a limousine, Woo-jin was dumped in front of Il Italian Joint. The place was packed with drunken idiots and their significant others spilling food all over the floor, screaming at the waitstaff, sending entrées back to the kitchen, and selecting the most cloying, earwormy tunes from the juke. Sandford Deane wore a tux with tie askew, disheveled hair, eyes looking like they’d recently shed tears. Woo-jin was early and Sandford accepted this turn of events with biblical-quality gratitude. “Oh thank you dear God, we need you in the kitchen asap, Woo-jin. Our savior!” Sandford clung to the champion dishwasher’s shoulders for a moment like he was hanging on to a piece of buoyant jetsam in the midst of a hurricane. “By the way, I have a special treat for you.” Sandford reached into his tux jacket and withdrew something fuzzy and shiny. “It’s the diamond-encrusted steel wool you requested. I had it flown in from Berlin.”
“Excellent!” Woo-jin said, bursting into the kitchen where the dishes were piled literally to the ceiling. Pontoon, Bahn Kan, and Ben O’Winn has started removing ceiling tiles to make room for the growing mound. Upon entering the kitchen the harried sauciers and waitresses paused a moment then erupted in cheers. Sally called out, “Mike! You’re just in time!” The three dishwashers who’d so thoroughly proved their incompetence hugged one another and buried their heads in each other’s shoulders with relieved weeping. Woo-jin cartwheeled past the fry station, popped into a midair somersault, and landed with scissoring double splits in front of the wash station. It pretty much helped the whole look of the performance that he was wearing a tracksuit embroidered with the words “Official Delegate.”
The busboys kept bringing more dirty plates, coffee cups, lipstick-imprinted stemware, napkins smeared with remnants of dessert. The Hobart hissed and trembled, pumping out clean dishes to the point of exhaustion. It struck Woo-jin that this situation might be one of those mathematical “story” problems. The machine could do a pallet of dishes in a minute and a half. But how many pallets’ worth of dishes arrived every minute and a half? If it was any number over one, it would be impossible to ever clean the dishes at a rate that would completely diminish the pile. In fact the pile would keep growing until it engulfed and overwhelmed Woo-jin and the wash station. Then again, there was a finite number of dishes in Il Italian Joint, wasn’t there? But what if there were trucks pulling up to the loading dock, delivering shipments of new clean dishes every minute and a half? Then it would be mathematically impossible to clean all the dishes there were to clean. Well, that would be true if the dishes kept getting dirty and the stream of valued guests remained constant. Maybe there was a line of tour buses outside filled with valued guests, ensuring that dishes would continue to get dirtied. But after a while the food would run out. Unless, of course, there were constant shipments of new produce, pasta, cheese, etc. The dishwasher, Woo-jin came to understand, was the center of the restaurant universe. Without the dishwasher nothing could happen, and yet he knew he was the lowest-paid person working here. On the plus side, that diamond-encrusted steel wool was doing a bang-up job on the soup pots.
Over the course of the evening the pile of dirty dishes did shrink, but too much was troubling Woo-jin for him to take much pleasure in the achievement. Even at the end of the shift when all the dishes were stashed and the wash station sparkled he wasn’t settled and knew he was about due for another ennui attack. Absentmindedly he slipped in his mouth guard in preparation. He looked forward to going home, collapsing in his hammock—oh, that’s right. Where was he going to sleep tonight? He three-pointered his apron into the laundry on the way out and exited through the back door, where he was met by a plainclothes police officer. Tall guy with a mustache, smelled like peanuts. Under a flickering, bug-fouled light he introduced himself as Officer Wiggins.
“You’re Woo-jin, am I correct? Woo-jin Kan?”
“No one says my last name usually. They think ‘jin’ is my last name.”
The officer put his hands on his hips and swiveled a bit, subconsciously stretching. “I understand you came across a body last night just north of Boeing Field.”
“I did. I already talked to some cops about it who gave me a glass of milk.”
“I heard. And I also understand you came across this body again around noon today.”
Three thoughts piled up in Woo-jin’s head, three thoughts too many. It took him a while to get them unjammed. He stood there, drooling around the mouth guard, nodding to himself as he began to understand. There really had been another body that looked like the first. Or—second thought here—maybe the cops dumped the same old body where they’d found it. Third thought: how did they know he’d seen the body again if he hadn’t told anyone?
“You need a ride?” Officer Wiggins said. “I’d like to bring you by the station to see something. Don’t worry, you’re not under arrest or anything. I was just hoping you might be able to help us sort this thing out.”
It was true, Woo-jin did need a ride. Wiggins cocked his head at his police mini-chopper. Soon they were levitating above the Il Italian Joint parking lot, rising above the tree line into the cloudy night. Woo-jin craned to catch sight of New York Alki growing on what had once been Bainbridge Island. A concrete seawall circled the island, keeping the waves from eroding the new contours of the shoreline. Huge, blocks-long banks of halogen lights lit acres of scaffolding as hundreds of cranes swung their loads to re-create the greatest city the world had ever known. The new Chrysler Building stood alone in a five-block radius, waiting for its neighbors. On the north end of the island, crews felled trees and demolished abandoned houses, carving and reshaping the land with bulldozers. Harlem looked to be pretty much empty at this point, except for a tiny Apollo Theater glowing in the woods.
“What do you make of this?” Wiggins said, jerking a thumb toward the construction. It was so rare that Woo-jin was asked for his opinion on matters that didn’t involve dishwashing that he didn’t know what to say, or whether he actually had an opinion. Wiggins continued, “If you ask me, it’s a huge waste. Rebuilding Manhattan when Seattle can’t even get its act together to build a monorail? And the congestion it’s going to bring to the region, don’t get me started.”
The chopper veered east, over the dome of Pioneer Square. This was the kind of night perfect for the appearance of a gigantic, celestial head, though Woo-jin couldn’t imagine coping with the demands of such an apparition. The chopper landed atop the city administration building and they hustled to an elevator. Heading underground, Woo-jin said, “Hey, you fly a helicopter. Do you know anything about when houses, or really trailers, get yanked up and moved to another place by a helicopter?”
“Like what happened to your foster sister,” Wiggins said. “That I can’t talk about. But I can tell you she’s safe and will be taken care of.”