Her face was blanched; her hair was matted. I spliced my fingers with hers and thought I’d never loved her more.
Norman said, “Esme, it’s like I said before: I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. I talked Lo into leaving work early and taking a drive with me and the car broke down. We just got back. Lo was just paying the cab.”
I nodded, restated, embellished, and finally I just wept. I pressed each of her knuckles to my lips and wept. I had escaped discovery — the relief was palpable — and so I wept for this. Norman had secured for me a chance to redress this terrible mistake, and so I wept for that, too. I wept because I knew I would not redress the mistake and, in fact, would do worse in the months to come. My wife loved me, my daughter would love me long before she knew what this meant, and for these travesties I wept most of all.
It pains me to have to say it, but I wilclass="underline" In the year after you were born, there were other women. Several. People I tried to connect with because I could not connect with you or your mother, though it turns out I couldn’t really connect with them, either. Still, I tried. They all knew I was married. I told them everything. I talked and shared and it helped. At least in the short term. I’d come home less afraid. Less unknown. And, while I knew it was wrong, it also felt right. So I was confused. And depressed. And when it got so bad, and I stopped knowing what to do, Esme made the decision for us. She packed you up and split. She left me to the Helix.
After that? Magical thinking. I’d wake up with hope. Not hope legitimized by a real development for good, not hope born of faith in the world’s benevolence, but hope that is your way of staying alive. I believed you were coming back. Some days, this was okay. Other days, I’d take myself down. What insanity! You’re an idiot! They are not coming back; they are never coming back. The rest of the day might be given over to sobbing in a ball, only the next morning I was up and at ’em, sprightly as before.
It got so quiet in the house, I’d put a fork down the garbage disposal just so I could call a repairman. I clogged the bathtub drain with screws and dimes and a sock, and when the plumber took a break, I undid his good work. But these people never stayed more than an hour.
I quit my job and began skimming a salary from donations to the Helix. We headquartered on campus, but I went everywhere, and at every stop, I asked after my wife. I wanted a miracle. Esme worked for the government; if she wanted to vanish, she would.
I went to therapy all the time. The regret of what I had done was awful, but the permanence was worse. A shrink at SUNY told me I should believe in myself. And I did. I believed I was stupid and evil and without hope. I thought I would not make it. Only time intervened — it always does — and with it came the prize and mercy of endurance. In lieu of facts, I had possibility. Since you could be anywhere, I began to see you everywhere. My little girl, in saddle shoes and party dress.
Esme left most of your stuff behind, so I have your baby socks in a drawer by my bed. But these are just artifacts, and as the years go by, they have become less solace than rebuke. One time I had your baby photo age-progressed, then made the mistake of doing it again elsewhere, and when the results were girls who barely resembled each other, I postered my wall with their likenesses.
Do you have my blond hair? Is it thick like your mother’s, does it lift and dip as you cruise the playground, do you have knock-knees and braces, are your eyes still bear brown?
For your last birthday, I sent you an unlimited gift certificate to the American Girl store in New York. It was returned. I sent you guest passes to the Oscars and afterparties and guaranteed a private interview with a teen heartthrob of your choosing. These were repulsed. I’ve sent letters begging for news. A photo. Something you made at school. And every day, every year: nothing.
What do you think this does to a man? I’ll tell you. It sends a man to North Korea.
And so, at last, the story of why I am in this mess. The story of Pyongyang, City of the Dead.
To be fair, and for the record, it was the North Koreans who approached me. Under the aegis of wanting an improved image in the West. They knew the Helix had reach. Daily contributions were up; sales of the Helix Monthly were up. RYLS attendance had gotten so huge, we outsold the Spanish pop phenomenon Enrique Iglesias. In the meantime, Pyongyang’s rapport with the United States was foundering badly. The U.S., which had promised to help them build two cold-water reactors, had called them a bad name. Others in receipt of the bad name were being bombed comprehensively. Pyongyang, nonplussed and ever sensitive to a patrimony of occupation, copped to having atomic weapons or, at the very least, the resources to make them, so back off. Another impasse that had already isolated the country to the point of starvation. Two million people dead of famine, which they blamed on cataclysmic phenomena in the soil. But which they also blamed on the American tyranny pledged to kill them all. Enter the Helix. They needed our help.
We were a good fit. For one, I sympathized with their anti-Americanism. I did. After all, what hubris on our part to have regarded Korea as war booty and divided it with the Soviets. The sundered families and affronted national esteem within five minutes of freedom from the Japanese. Kim Il-sung’s aggression, though unwarranted, punished with a million dead. It was no small wonder they hated us.
Two: North Korea is the last black spot on the map. Solipsism, repression, and homogeneity are its standout qualities. So imagine what I could do for them. Improve their image? Fine. Use the Helix to forge ties — one person at a time — with the most isolated people on earth? Nobel Prize — winning. And in the meantime, because I knew to hedge my bets, I’d try to finagle contact with the American defectors Esme had been trying to recruit so many years before. I wanted to make her a hero. I wanted to make us both heroes so that she’d see in me something to love.
So I went to the North, to meet Kim Jong-il. To set up some Helix events, and to propose bringing many of my followers to participate. The plan wasn’t just to thaw relations but to change the way we thought about each other. If this could be accomplished in North Korea, it could be accomplished anywhere.
I decided to take Isolde. She’d been a prostitute when we met, and so I thought her vocation would provide me with some comfort. Putage may not be unique to the free world, but it’s still totem for the erotic and transactive possibilities therein, and I wanted these reminders of home to protect me in this forbidding and scary place.
We flew from Beijing on Air Koryo, one of only six flights making the descent into North Korea a week. I was sure the plane wouldn’t make it. As soon as we sat down, the anachronistic hairstylings of the crew seemed to suggest other, more dire anachronisms — a gunpowder engine, for instance. We were the only Caucasians onboard, though the cabin was half-empty. Who wanted to visit North Korea? Who was permitted to visit North Korea? The occasion for the Japanese tourists we’d come with was the Mass Games, which meant the DPRK had relaxed its antipathy to foreigners to help internationalize the harmony of the socialist state manifest in eighty thousand gymnasts tossing a ball at the same time. The Japanese were excited. Isolde was excited. She had never seen an Asian or heard a foreign tongue, so consider the disarrangement of mind caused by so many doors flung open at once.
Our seats were upholstered in a tan fabric textured like denim. Our reading material comprised fictions sponsored by the North Korean government to the effect that the United States endorsed Satanism. We were a fount of colonialist doctrine currently or at one time expressed in the following: Mexico, China, Greece, the Philippines, Albania, Iran, Guatemala, Haiti, Panama, Vietnam, Cambodia, Zaire, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Fiji, Turkey, Iceland, Taiwan, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Grenada, Haiti, Afghanistan. Where were the American imperialists most in evidence today? Iraq. What was the country most likely to stampede the third world on the flimsiest of pretexts? America.