“B-twelve plus,” she said, and again came the flashlight.
I swatted at the barrel until she turned it off. My Esme, six months pregnant, with hair parted down the middle and trussed in short pigtails. The look was not at all in keeping with the woman I knew, nor was her floral maternity blouse or canvas satchel. But it did not matter. She could have been in a chicken suit — my feelings were unchanged. I wanted to solder my body to hers, but it would not do to have Yul watching. He had served his purpose; now go away.
“B what?” I said.
“Twelve. Twelve plus. Will help with the grogginess. Yul said you drank two cups. One would have been enough.”
I rubbed at my eyes and tried to think. But — what?
Esme sat next to me. “You’ll be feeling better in a second,” she said, and she touched my forehead with the back of her hand. I was starting to already. She took my pulse.
I’d had many feelings in the anticipation of this moment, though none was on hand to help me recruit Esme back into my life. I had intended to plead and, that failing, to use the adamance of my passion to win a chance. But my head was still gruel.
You will ask why I loved her, and the answer is, I do not know. Once we’re past the qualities we all rejoice in our lovers — she is kind, she is funny, she is smart — there comes the X factor. Norman says that when you cite X factor, you are unburdening yourself of the onus to think. Imagine we chalked up all of our feelings to the X factor. Why do I kill? I dunno, it’s just got that special something. Norman has a point, but it does not attend to the experience of meeting a person who makes you want to live forever.
Esme said, “In any other universe, a man coming for Yul at three a.m. is the RDEI. Only it’s not the RDEI; it’s Thurlow Dan come to find true love. Jesus.”
“What’s the RDEI?”
She slipped her fingers under her glasses and began to press and rub at her eyes. “You’re going to cost me my job,” she said. “Which is almost ironic, since you pretty much got me this assignment to begin with.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, only that she was not saying what I most dreaded to hear. Go home, Thurlow. Leave me alone, Thurlow. I never want to see you again, Thurlow.
She leaned back into the couch and touched her stomach. “I’m going to be a tennis ball at a party tonight.” She lifted her blouse, and there was the outline of a tennis ball in white paint. “A costume party at the high school gym. I’ll probably be the only person without a date. Bare-balled and pregnant.” She laughed grimly.
I did not ask whatever happened to not wanting the baby. I asked, instead, if she’d been feeling okay. She shook her head. There had been some bleeding early on, all-day nausea that sneered at the misnomer morning sickness, and a test for CF that boded poorly. I watched her relate these difficulties and was just beginning to marvel at the stoicism with which she’d met each one when the unexpected happened. She wept.
The effect was to make of the B12, in contrast, a shot of tar. I vaulted to her side and took her hand. She wiped at the tears with the hem of her shirt and said, “Listen to me very carefully. Yul is a North Korean defector. You don’t know what I do for a living, but it’s enough to say he’s helping us. And so is this pregnancy. It keeps our cover. But, Thurlow”—and here she started to cry anew—“I’m scared. I’m going to have a baby. I’ve never held a newborn. I never even had a pet.”
“You had lizards.”
“They died.”
We stayed like that for a while, her crying into my chest and me acclimating to the opportunities grown between us with every tear. When we’d both taken our thoughts as far as we could alone, we aired them out. She said I should leave; I said we should marry. She said, “Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?” I said, “Yes. Perfectly.” We set a date for two weeks later.
I’m aware that for Esme, there was a degree of convenience to these nuptials. But that did not have to preclude feelings she might have had for me, or could grow to have in time. I saw the look on her face when she realized I was there to stay. There was incredulity and some pity — I would, after all, do anything for her — but also relief and gratitude. She would not be going through this alone.
In the weeks that followed, I heard more about Yul. He and his wife had escaped from North Korea through China. Crossed the Tumen River from Musan in the northeast territory using a flotation device for children. Traveled four thousand miles through the mountains down the coast, shirking border patrols, opium smugglers, and slave traders, any of whom would have sold his wife as a prostitute and returned him to North Korea, where he’d have been executed or jailed in a concentration camp, some of which are thirty miles long. Bigger than Auschwitz. Possibly more brutal in the day-to-day. They traveled at night, mostly by foot, passing into Vietnam and Laos, over the Mekong and into Thailand.
The Chois were not forthcoming with their experience; I got it all from Esme, in whose pillow talk were breaches of security that could have won Pulitzers for every journalist in America. Yul, though a trained OB, had worked as a propaganda writer when it became clear this was the only way to support his family. To live in Pyongyang and get rations that rivaled in bounty what the government allotted its prize citizens, among them four American soldiers who had crossed the DMZ in the early sixties and lived in Pyongyang ever since.
And here was where Esme fit in. And why, years later, I had good cause to go to North Korea myself. At some point, these four American GIs would get to be of growing interest to the White House, for two reasons. First, a Pentagon memo about the four would be leaked to the press. What an uproar! Were they defectors or prisoners? The Pentagon denied knowledge of any living POWs but did concede to having watched a North Korean movie, Nameless Heroes, in which, lo and behold, the four American soldiers had starring roles as Western agents of evil. For years, the army’s theory on these men was that they were MIA. The North Korean theory was that they were promised body and soul to communist North Korea. Since neither seemed likely, the Americans figured maybe the thing was to get the three (by then one had died) to exercise influence from within. They were movie stars. And since Kim Jong-il was a movie buff with a library of twenty thousand films, and since he’d written volumes on the subject of the movie arts, the thinking was that he would not be able to withstand the allure of four movie stars, never mind the country of their birth or ended allegiance.
Second, one morning, a sub would wash up in the Sea of Japan, empty of its twenty-six North Korean commandos, who were apparently on the lam in South Korea, plotting God knows. The result? Sixty thousand South Korean troops on their tail for fifty-three days, and during this time, did the U.S. have any idea what was going on? Not really. Meantime, the North Koreans had flouted the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty again and again. Did the U.S. have any clue what her intentions were? No on that, too. Wouldn’t it be nice to have people on the inside? You bet. Enter Yul and Yul’s contacts, some of whom were in the film business. Enter Esme, on a mission.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Before all this, Esme and I still had our nights together, when she’d read to me from Kim Jong-il’s manifesto On the Art of Cinema. I had a hard time getting past the foreclosing austerity of the man’s author bio—Kim Jong-il is leader of North Korea. Kim Jong-il succeeded his father, Kim Il-sung, who had ruled North Korea since 1948—though I did appreciate the singleness of purpose with which I imagined him recording his thoughts. The section titles were no joke. Life Is Struggle and Struggle Is Life. Compose the Plot Correctly. The Best Possible Use Should Be Made of Music and Sound. At no point did you ever get the sense that any of the tome’s fluorescence was lost in translation. I can still picture Esme, whaled out on the bed, pointing a Cheeze Doodle to passages she liked. “Look at this,” she’d say, and laugh so big I could see the snack-food paste around her molars. And so I’d look and read aloud: “Once agreement has been reached in discussion, the director must act on it promptly, firmly basing the production on it and never deviating from it, no matter what happens. If the director vacillates, so will the whole collective, and if that happens, the production will fail.”