But a mudang treated something else. Something that couldn’t be reached with chemicals or seen on X-rays. The thing that causes illness, the thing that comes before viruses and bacteria, even DNA. Uhwan. What she called “misfortune” and others might think of as simple “bad luck,” though it was far worse than that when uhwan began to creep into your life. Just a few things would go wrong at first, but well within the realm of expectations. A setback here, a letdown there, but you keep up, mostly. Bad things happen, but don’t they happen to everyone sometimes? Only like in an undertow at the beach, you are being pulled gradually in the wrong direction. You correct, but you overcorrect. You flail, but this makes it worse. Things fall apart, and you hurriedly glue the pieces back together and cannot ignore the resulting cracks. There isn’t time to do more because other, larger things are going wrong already. Medicine cannot cure the problem. Psychology cannot resolve it. One day you wake up to discover that where once there was one thing wrong, there are now hundreds. Far more is wrong than right. Because misfortune is a plague that begets plagues. What starts as a tiny imbalance creates a ripple effect that can take down empires.
What string of ever-worsening misfortunes preceded Chongso’s accident? What had made Mrs. Kim decide to punish him that morning? What had led him to dare to sneak out on his own to buy the comic book? What had the driver been doing instead of watching the road? No disaster is a singular incident. It is the tsunami that follows the swelling tide. It is the nuclear meltdown that begins when a dozen fail-safes have failed. Before the chemo, before the cancer, before the cell mutation, there is the misfortune. Uhwan.
William felt for the small lump in his back pocket, beneath the address book, and fished out the little Aqualad figurine. One final time he studied. He liked to think it was part of some thirteenth art piece that she’d never gotten to make. He liked to think it would have had something to do with him. Only then he thought that, really, as much as all the pieces had to do with death and disappointment and her friends, they also had something to do with him, her last love. Gently, he set the little superhero down on the altar beside the candles, and said a quiet prayer for Chongso Kim.
William moved through the apartment, half expecting some dog or husband to appear and kill him. He had hoped — he didn’t know. That he’d walk in and find Irene there, sitting on the couch beside Grandma Fiona, book on her lap, twirling her hair, paint on her arms. That she would ease her body around his as he lay down and touch his hair. That he would call her No Ears and they would talk about Yesterday and Today, with no mention of that foul uninvited guest Tomorrow. If he could have just one more day, he thought, like the first one. Before she’d heard back from the doctors and begun dying. If he could just have one more day when nothing was wrong, when time could be wasted, because there had still been so, so much of it out there.
And then he saw, through the window in what was now a room filled with old boxes. It was the exact view painted in the back of his old book. The Brooklyn Bridge. Cables arching up like the frame of a great harp, vibrating with the whispered secrets of its crossers. This was the window she’d looked out of each night as she fell asleep and each morning when she’d woken up. As he lay there, he imagined he could hear voices traveling up the strings and through the steel, flickering between the cars and in the thump of the bicycle wheels against the wood. He saw the roadway rising and falling, like a wave out on the sea.
It took him a moment to remember that he hadn’t smoked anything all morning. This wasn’t that. All those voices, all those wheels and feet were coming together into a harmony. A simple, perfect note that resonated with the bridge itself and the churning river beneath. Echoing with the cries of the captains of the great wooden ships, just setting sail from South Street, casting off for the seven oceans, to journey in dreams. William watched in awe as the notes moved through the roadway like a sine curve, an octave that caused bricks to detach one at a time from the towers, a flat foot on each shore.
Into the blue sky, cars and people flew like a peppering of seagulls, up and up and never down. Up into the crystal cotton of the clouds. Light gleamed off their wristwatches and hubcaps and handlebars. They became fins in the ocean of sky. Brick by brick, the bridge rose into the air, pulling the river with it, drop by drop. Atlantis rose. Land of tomorrows and yesteryears. Once there was a continent that sank into the sea. Farewell! he cried to the people as they vanished. Trillions of them, it seemed, as the entire bridge fell into the sky.
THE WEDDING OF SARA SHERMAN AND GEORGE MURPHY
Sara Sherman ran between the rooms of the bridal suite, lifting her dress so it wouldn’t sweep the Waldorf’s tapestry rugs. The dress was still an eighth of an inch too long, even after she’d told the lady at Nelson’s to shorten it at both the six-week and the one-month fittings. So now the lace along the edge had accumulated a faint grayness as she rushed from the front door — where she’d just received an update from Zacharie, the hotel’s event coordinator, about the situation with the chairs — back into the bedroom where her sisters, Adeline and Eddy, were converging on George’s mother, intent on taking down the hair that the stylist, Erikah, had spent two hours putting up that morning.
Barely had that been handled when she caught her own mother plucking “excess” baby’s breath from the bouquets. Sara redirected her into checking on whether the Krazy Glue was setting properly on George’s Grandma Pertie’s snapped heel. And did anyone have an approximate GPS location on his older brother, Clarence? Who, despite having strict orders to stay in Midtown, had sneaked off that morning to visit the Cloisters near Fort Tryon Park, only to wind up getting stuck in a cab on the West Side Highway behind some kind of gubernatorial motorcade? For all Sara cared, Clarence could rot on the asphalt overlooking the Boat Basin, but of course, this actual Mensa member had decided it would be a good idea to take the two wedding bands with him.
She was interrupted by George’s little niece, Beth, the seven-year-old daughter of George’s younger brother, Franklin (who at sixteen had been absentminded about protection at a post-prom party). Sara liked Beth immensely, for she was apparently the only other responsible human being in the entire bridal suite. Beth had been fully set in her flower-girl dress, with hair done and shoes on, for over two hours now. Now she held Sara’s phone in the air calmly and said, “It’s ringing.” Beth was in charge of fielding calls and beating level twenty in Plants vs. Zombies.
Sara looked at the phone: it was Minister Thaw, who had already left two messages that morning. He had conducted their required premarital counseling sessions, where they’d had plenty of time to delve into the minutiae of Episcopalian dogma and how it differed from George’s Catholicism and “What about the children?”—and now he was bringing up reordering all the readings, even though the programs had already been printed and the whole thing had been successfully rehearsed the night before. Stay the course! she wanted to yell into his fuzzy little ears. We’re almost through this! Instead she rejected the call, handed the phone back to Beth, and called out to the bridal suite, “Does anyone have the chalk?” Again, only Beth knew the location of the Crayola box and began helpfully whitening the gray hem of the wedding dress.
“Thank you, sweetie. And do you know where Adeline is?”
Beth didn’t. No one nearby knew. Perfect. Not only had their mother guilted Sara into asking her uptight older sister to fill the maid of honor post, and not only had Adeline then thrown a spectacularly dull bachelorette party (appletinis and feather boas), but she had already abandoned Sara and the day’s proceedings.