Every night after booklessly wandering the city in search of an agent, dragging himself through the door of his building, Woo-jin found his penthouse that much more infested with marauders high on one thing or another and their dogs and cats. Which made it all the stranger when he returned one night to find the penthouse fairly empty, just a man who looked like a fire fighter asleep facedown, snoring in the book-lined library. Then, from above, snickers. Woo-jin craned his neck to see that twenty feet up the usual rabble had ascended to the ceiling. Just kind of floating there like astronauts in zero-G. One young gentleman spilled his white Russian on Woo-jin’s shoulder.
Neethan spun around the chandelier, brushing aside a couple pairs of groping hands, encircled by cameramen standing on the ceiling. “Woo-jin!” he called down, “Take a hit off one of those balloons and join us!”
In the corner, beside the bigass FUS-era globe marked with graphic representations of fires, tornadoes, rogue glaciers, earthquake fissures, swarms of locusts, and the like was a bouquet of balloons with their strings tied to a paperweight in the shape of the Arc de Triomphe.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Inhale the air inside it!” Neethan said. “Like you’re doing a whippit!”
“Like I’m whipping what?”
“Just open the end of it and breathe in the air.”
Woo-jin emptied the contents of a balloon into his lungs. Right away he felt a nagging absence of gravity. Some force seemed to pull his legs out from under him and he gradually rose to the ceiling, where Neethan looped an arm around him.
“How you holding up, buddy?” Neethan asked, half to the cameras.
“I think I need to start writing my book again.”
“Go for it, buddy. Hey, can I get one of those mini pizza things over here? Get this—I met this crazy couple of university professors who happen to know a lot about my tribe. They’re over there by the guy in the bear suit.”
Cut away to the Vacunins pausing their zero-G heavy petting to pinkie wave at Neethan.
“I need to go home,” Woo-jin said.
“For real?” Neethan said, pretend-disappointed. “Come on, no…”
“I can’t write the book I’m supposed to write here.”
Neethan nodded to the cameras. “You guys getting all this? Cool…” He lowered his voice and leaned in close. “Hey. Can you see me?”
“See you? Yeah?”
Eavesdropping onlookers chortled. Neethan lowered his voice, somewhat panicked. “Seriously, bro, I need to figure out what kind of real I am.”
A rumble of conversation passed through the floating assemblage. Woo-jin caught pieces of it. Supposedly the messiah was near. “The king! The king! He has arrived!” Perplexed grins and bursts of laughter all around. A waft of combo hash-crack smoke. “In Central Park? Dude, I am so there.” Someone, an actress maybe, wearing little more than a shoe, opened a high window and squeezed out to drift moonward in the night. Others followed, cackling, anxious for their chance to witness the messiah’s return. Eventually the exodus left Woo-jin and Neethan alone, floating on the ceiling, while someone snored inside the chandelier.
“The messiah, huh?” Neethan sighed. “I was supposed to abort that son of a bitch.”
Eventually they floated to the floor. Woo-jin walked in a circle to shake out his legs as gravity reasserted itself. Neethan tossed cubes into a glass and poured something brownish on top of them.
“Maybe you’ll find your people,” Woo-jin said.
“I’m not a person, I’m a character. And I am fabulously famous and sexy and wealthy,” Neethan said almost sadly, then killed his drink.
“How should I get home to Seattle?”
“Easy. Just catch the Q from Fifty-ninth.”
That night Woo-jin said good-bye to New York Alki, hopping on a subway just before it left the platform. Here and there folks crammed words into crossword puzzles or slept listening to iPods. After a time Woo-jin closed his eyes and let his head rock back and forth as it rested against the glass. Later, a sense of motionlessness woke him. He clambered out of the train into a deep darkness that confusingly revealed streets and houses. He headed toward the rivery car sounds and found himself on Aurora, Seattle’s avenue of hookers, gun shops, and moving-van companies, then veered south as day broke over his left shoulder, the purple serration of the Cascades rising beyond the repaired and repellent city. Most of these neighborhoods were abandoned but here and there a house suggested the presence of a family sleeping inside, with mowed lawns and new shingles, vehicles glossy with dew parked out front. Aurora turned into 99 and Woo-jin dipped beneath the city and when he came out of the tunnel it was morning with seagull cries and the salty, creosote stench of the waterfront. After this brief view of the sound the roadway dipped under the dome and Woo-jin trudged through artificially lit Pioneer Square, stopped to buy a cookie, passed the stadiums, came out on the other side of the dome onto Fourth Avenue, and crossed Lucile into Georgetown.
He expected the trailer to still be gone but there it was, parked in the spot that had recently been a patch of littery dirt. He stood numb from walking and blinked in the dust. After a moment the door creaked open, revealing a statuesque woman in a glittery silver bikini.
Patsy spoke. “Woo-jin! Where the heck have you been? Why are you wearing that stupid suit? Take a look at what they did to me! Oh my God, Woo-jin, they made me not a pharmer anymore! Check this body out! Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about! They took off the penises and tissues and everything! Oh, my God I’m so hungry! Don’t you tell me you didn’t bring me leftovers to eat! Don’t just stand there grinning like an idiot, Woo-jin Kan. Feed me! Feed me! FEED ME!”
Towels, water, rubbing alcohol, blood, gauze. Abby dressed Rocco’s wounds in the bathroom of the apartment, tossing saturated clothes and absorbent materials into the tub. He murmured codes into the pocket transmitter then slept wrapped in a comforter on the couch while the Bionet went to work rebuilding tissues. Abby stood over him, watching him sleep, knowing that if she was going to kill him, it would have to be now.
Midway through the bread at their favorite Meatpacking District wine bar, Sylvie told Rocco about a manuscript she’d just accepted.
“I missed you,” Rocco said.
Sylvie wanted to say she missed him, too, but that wouldn’t have been entirely true. Part of her—most of her—didn’t even know who the hell he was. Some guy plowing his fingers through cheek stubble, considering the Malbecs. Who was he again? Oh, right, he was Rocco. She knew him? Yes, everything about him looked familiar. She anticipated the eyelid flutter thing he did when he laughed. A script of possible behaviors whirred away somewhere cranial, and thinking about how or why she knew him seemed to disrupt it.