He went to Bower and told him he wanted his summer to be a continuation of his education, not an interruption, and to that end he wanted to spend it somewhere else. A visitor’s eagerness to see more than he has already seen is always pleasing, and Bower thought it was a wonderful idea. It was evidence of initiative, and offset his concern that Chuck had turned out to be somewhat withdrawn. Before ratifying the plan he interrogated Chuck very thoroughly, not only to clarify things for himself but to clarify things for the boy, as he always thought of him. “You will be on your own. Things are very easy for you here. I hope you realize that. You are surrounded by your friends. If you go off somewhere for the summer you’ll have to watch out for yourself and keep your wits about you, and I’ll expect you to be a credit to Sewanee wherever you are.”
“I understand,” he said.
“Do you think you can get along all right? I’ll take your word.”
“Yes.”
Bower propped his fingertips together and tilted his head, awaiting some elaboration to this answer, and when none came he was momentarily thrown. Then he decided to be impressed by Chuck’s concision. “Well,” he said grandly. “I’ll start sniffing around, then. I’m sure I can come up with something.”
A few days later, Bower called him back. “A great patron of Sewanee’s, and an old classmate of mine, in fact. Tippett House ’25.” This man owned a publishing concern in Chicago, “complicated work,” Bower said kindly, but there was also a bindery, which was always shorthanded. How did that sound? Chicago?
The Greyhound bus stopped in Monteagle on its way north from Chattanooga, Atlanta, Savannah, or on its way south to those places. Monteagle was a three-mile walk from Sewanee, all downhill, and as the road descended the trees thinned so that there was more and more tramped, dusty grass, and the sky opened wide. The town was small and straightforward: a gas station, a grocery store, and a small collection of houses he could see the beginning of, to the south, before the road took a turn. The grocery store’s windows were crowded with advertisements for small sums. Only 10 cents! Only 25 cents! The houses came right to the road. He had always been southbound, heading for Chattanooga and a transfer that would take him to Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia, to whatever small church was awaiting him. The bus would slide around the bend and barely pause, and then as he weaved down the aisle he would lean to watch out the window as the front edge of Monteagle that he had gazed at exhaustingly, until it was no longer an impoverished sliver but the whole, intricate, unexpandable thing, suddenly rejoined the rest of itself. The entire town would flash by before he saw anything more than its tail as it slipped out of sight. The bus would pause only once more, in Jasper, before arriving at the Chattanooga station, where the noncommittal prelude was brought to an end and everyone leaped up and changed buses with new, narrow determination. Chattanooga was the aperture that seemed to give onto the whole of the South, and soon he would think of Evansville, Indiana, this way, as a gate to the North.
The northbound and southbound stops faced each other across the road, but he had never seen another person there. Now there was a man on the southbound side. Chuck perched self-consciously on his upended suitcase, which he had placed in the dust, where the heat wouldn’t bounce off the stones back at him. The unprecedented traveler on the other side of the road had done the same thing. At first they only watched each other clandestinely, but after it was clear there was nowhere else to look they examined each other with obvious interest. The other man might have been older than him by ten or fifteen years. He was wearing a lopsided, curl-brimmed leather hat and a white cotton T-shirt, and his jacket hung over his knee. The road was too wide to speak across, but narrow enough that he could see the man’s calm smile, and his eyes set in the shadow from his hat.
He tried to imagine where this man was going. When he pored over maps at the library he always strayed toward the coasts, analyzing the clues in the shape of an edge. The Louisiana coast looked like a splatter of ink. It had scattered islands everywhere. On the map New Orleans and everything near it was scored with blue lines, to indicate swampland. He imagined a lake of bright grass, the flash low in the stalks when the wind parted them and the sun struck the water. He missed the water, he thought, although beneath this thought his mind idly sorted the Louisiana names he had memorized, on the principle that memorization was always helpful in a general way—10 cents! 25 cents! was helpful, even if he had no more particular interest in these exclamations than he had in the names that fanned out from the hub of New Orleans. Barataria, Lafitte, Meraux. Out of nowhere the southbound bus slid around the bend and paused, and he saw the man reappear in its windows, moving down the aisle. As the bus pulled away the man bent down and waved to him, grinning. His own arm flew up and they waved energetically to each other for those few seconds as the bus plunged through Monteagle and left it behind.
His own bus came more than thirty minutes later, after his hair felt like hot metal to the touch and his vision was swimming with splotches. He had no hat. He climbed on board, unsteadily, and fell asleep. When he woke again he realized he’d been dreaming of being at sea. His heart beat quickly. But the bus swayed and pitched less like a ship than an ungainly, sturdy animal. The afternoon had grown long. Outside the bus windows the hills cast great, round shadows onto themselves, and beyond the reach of the shadows their color was a green-steeped gold, like a block of sun trapped in pondwater. All the trees were in full leaf now and the hillsides so densely forested that their substance seemed to be the leaves, unbroken but varying in color and texture from particle to particle. He saw a hawk wheeling over the road and strained his neck until it drifted out of sight. The land was so lush and the color of the light so palpable that at first he forgot that this was the same road he had driven up and down with Katherine, in the dark, the night she took him to dinner. When he remembered that he closed his eyes again. The sun was a bloated red ball as the bus pulled into Nashville, and he rose automatically, because Nashville was not so unlike Chattanooga. It was only a juncture, containing no significance. Des Allemandes, Point à la Hache, Belle Chasse. He had the thought, brief and irritating, that he was traveling in the wrong direction. He wanted to be going toward the ocean. The bus to Chicago was already crowded when he found it; he took a window seat and watched it fill completely. A ten- or twelve-year-old boy with thin blond hair cropped so short it looked pink climbed on board and, after a brief hesitation, took the seat beside him. “Where you from?” he asked, as the bus pulled away. It was dark now; he saw the bright dome of the capitol building as the bus turned onto the highway.
“Seoul, Korea.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You know it?” In his surprise he sounded more eager than he’d meant to. He didn’t want to talk to this boy.
“Oh, yeah. Seoul Poo-san Pyong-yang.” He hit each consonant with relish. “My brother went in the war.”
“He comes back all right?”
“Oh, yeah. You want some gum? My brother says gooks are nuts about gum.”
He took the gum and they both chewed meditatively until the boy wondered whether he wanted the comic that came in the wrapper, and when he had surrendered it the boy asked with sudden, pouncing insight, “You going to Chi?”
“Chi?” he repeated.
“Chi-cago.”
“Yes.”
“Oh!” the boy said, as if he’d been whacked in the stomach. “I thought so! There’s a big old Chinaman town in Chi where they’ve got a place where they’ve got sharks and giant snakes and monkeys hung in the windows to eat and you can go and they take the head off with an ax and cook it and then you can go and there’s a wizard where he has lizards in jars and eyeballs, and there’s a big assortment,” he said with incongruous maturity, “of throwing knives and they’ve also got kung fu stuff and airplanes.”
“You’ve been here?” he asked, when the boy paused.
“No,” the boy said with unmistakable bitterness. “My brother goes and brings me stuff once in a while.”
The boy was a resource of information on organized vice and Chicago’s other miscellaneous depravities, Al Capone and restaurants where girls wore only feathers and other girls wore, as he said, “just a string”—which interested him solely as an example of the bizarre—and dull-looking places with hidden back rooms, perhaps behind a swinging wall, where there was gambling. Chi was his dream city. “I dream of going there,” he said, very simply. “I sure envy you. I would make you take me with you if you swore you was going to go straight to the Chinaman town.”
“I’m not a Chinese.”
“That’s okay,” the boy told him kindly.
They lapsed into silence. The boy fell asleep for several hours, slumped crookedly in his seat, and woke up startled. He stared at Chuck in shock, and for a moment Chuck was afraid he would leap up and stand in the aisle, panting unhappily. “Where are we?” the boy whispered. He leaned carelessly across Chuck’s seat and they peered into the darkness together. They were on an express bus. It had tunneled ceaselessly since they left Nashville. The boy sat back and sighed. They shared a weak, yellow pool of light. Everywhere else the bus lay in blackness, with the quiet roar of the engine and the outside air shearing past, like the sound of the ocean, and within this the shifting, sighing, breathing sounds of people. In the hours while the boy was asleep he had sat with his head turned toward the window, and the featureless night outside, dusted over with the reflection of his weak reading light, had eased its way behind his eyes and filled him with nothing but staring. He didn’t know how much time had gone by. He hadn’t thought of anything. The boy had also altered, with the hush inside the bus. “I have a comic, but I get motion sick reading,” he said. “On a bus, I mean. Would you like to read it?”
At first he misunderstood. “Thank you, no,” he said.
“It’s a good one,” the boy said hopefully.
He read the comic to the boy in a conspiratorial whisper. He had to describe the pictures, too, because even looking at them made the boy queasy. The boy put his head near Chuck and closed his eyes with pleasure as Chuck spoke. “The two guys now duck down, and third guy’s feet we see coming to us, over their head. This third guy is a Chinese, jumping over the trench—”
“I know, I know,” the boy whispered.
“American guy’s eyes fill up the whole picture, stretched out big.” The boy’s eyes flew open briefly, in imitation. “‘Ahhh!’” Chuck went on, in an undertone. “‘They are coming too fast!’ he says. Now we see Chinese coming, like a wall of them. They have bayonets raised up. ‘Aieee!’”
They came to Evansville, Indiana, at midnight. The premature night, that had put the bus to sleep at nine o’clock, was suspended. Passengers woke, twisted in their seats, peered out the window. The bus bounced over a steel-girder bridge and its hum rose an octave. “Ohio River,” the boy announced. They had left Kentucky, unseen and unthought-of. The great skeleton of the bridge poured past the windows and even there, hundreds of miles away from it, he felt the approach of a huge city and could never think of Evansville again—thrown there on the mud bank in the middle of flat land with one or two pale orange lights in the streets as the bus found the station—without it seeming continuous with that powerful center. There were people awake at the small station, alert and intelligent, with their bags in their hands. “Chi!” the boy said avidly, as they plunged into darkness again. Now the bus seemed to fly more quickly over the level land. He could pick out the horizon, where the wildly star-covered sky rose straight out of the ground. No one slept anymore, and the boy was reminded, with a fresh sense of urgency, of the rest of his brother’s teachings. There were stuffed elephants! There was an aquarium with a tank as big as a lake, sitting in the middle of a room. His brother said if you went to a hotel they gave you anything, food and booze and dames, the boy noted emphatically. And the stuff they had in Chinatown, devil idols and a chicken that danced on a plate. The bus rumbled with conversation, and the tiny lights blinked on over the seats. “I don’t want to go home!” said the boy with disgust. The bus was full of itinerants, people who slid through the night as a matter of course. “Where is your home?” he asked the boy, who seemed to feel compromised by the fact that he had one.
“Terre Haute,” he spat. When asked to spell it he did so with convulsions and eye-rolling.
Terre Haute. He was startled, to think of such a name here. He had seen that word before. Grand Terre Isle.
“It means ‘high land,’” said the boy, smirking. “Ha!”
They came into Terre Haute after two o’clock in the morning, an eerie hour for a boy to be arriving at home. “You got somebody who meets you?” he asked the boy, who had turned around backwards in his seat and now knelt on it, with his cheek flat against the seat’s back, fixing Chuck with a steady gaze.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “My brother says you can’t tell the difference between gooks and chinks so I’m getting a good look at you and when he takes me to Chinatown with him I’ll bet I can tell. Can you tell?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
“There’s the river.” The road ran next to it, hugging a hillside. The ground dropped away sharply to their right. The moon had risen and they could see the tops of trees and beyond them, far below, the silver sheet of the river reaching toward the opposite bank. “Wa-bash River,” the boy said, and then the bus had swung into the Terre Haute station and he was gone, yelling, “I shouldn’t even get off, I should just go right on up to Chi with you,” and the bus was much quieter. He kept looking at the strangely empty seat beside him.
Terre Haute might have been named by a traveler on his way from the south to Chicago. That hill that rose up from the river was the last high land, or land of any shape at all, that he saw. After they left the town the land was level in every direction and the horizon made a vast circle with the bus at its center. For an hour or more the river remained alongside, although when the land had spread out the river slid a certain distance, sometimes as much as a mile, from the road, where it lay like a glittering stripe. Then it turned east, and stretched away. His eye could see it all the way to the horizon. The bus kept plowing north, and the whole eastern sky stood unobstructed. When the stars first began to seem weak he checked his watch. The dawn came by increments, always slightly outstripping his ability to notice it, and then all at once the stars were gone and the first unbelievably distinct ray of the sunrise had emerged. Farmland as perfectly flat as an ocean surrounded them. In the distance he saw an occasional tree, black and solitary. The combed fields turned past like the spokes of a wheel. When the sun was high a railroad line came to join the road, and filling stations and truck stops gave way to flat-topped brick houses and grain elevators and smokestacks and storefronts and traffic lights strung overhead, and then too many buildings to see anything but a flash in the distance, as if from the actual ocean.
He came out of the bus station into an early May morning just reaching the sidewalks on the west sides of the streets. The light was city light, stretching over the sides of buildings, blazing in windows. Businessmen still wearing their winter fedoras were walking to work. He had studied his map of downtown Chicago and memorized the way from the station to the bindery so that he wouldn’t be seen standing helplessly on the street with a map in his hand: four blocks east and then fourteen blocks south along Michigan Avenue. But once on the street he didn’t know which way was east. He stood there a moment, outwardly calm, feeling the cool that hadn’t yet been evaporated by the concrete, seeing every particle of every building teem with color and roughness the way the hills outside Sewanee had teemed, because he hadn’t slept at all. He stepped off the curb and looked down the canyon of buildings straight into a blinding glare. Sitting at the end of the crevice was a neat square of blue. He walked that way, east, toward the lake.
When he reached Michigan Avenue everything fell away between there and the water. Across the expanse of the park he could see the marina, with its forest of unrigged masts. Michigan Avenue was four lanes wide, and the sidewalks broad and level. He passed the red carpets and taut awnings of luxury hotels; the colonnade of the library; gilty, scrolled theater-fronts. Then Michigan Avenue lost the park and, without changing direction, shifted inland, as the coastline of the lake curved away. The buildings diminished and cropped up on both sides of the narrower street. He found a cafeteria a block shy of his destination and ordered fried eggs at the counter, suddenly apprehensive. Yet when he presented himself at the bindery, a huge brick building on the lake side of the street, it was just nine o’clock in the morning, and he wasn’t expected. The manager nodded at him and showed him the letter from Bower, lifting it briefly off a pile on his desk. “I expected you next week. Summer work, your guy said. We lay most people off in the summer. It’s a bad time for bookbinding. The glue melts and the pages curl up. Not a lot of people want to work here in the summer anyway. But you’ll have plenty to do. There’s always backlog in the morgue.” He looked up at Chuck for the first time. “So you’re a Korean. We’ve got a lot of Chinese in this city and a lot of Japs but I don’t know that we have much Koreans. How did you people like that war we had for you?”
“Very much,” he said.
“I hope those aren’t your only change of clothes. It’s dirty work.” He handed Chuck a card for a rooming house not far away. “Come back tomorrow. You’ll work with Fran. She’s in charge down there.”
He had thought it would be an actual bindery, where books were made. He wasn’t romantic about that idea, but he associated factories of any kind with mindless racket and a constant propulsion that kept just ahead of boredom, and people, grabbing things or throwing things or moving them around. But there were no people where he worked, down in the morgue. And it was a rebindery, for books that had already been made, used, and broken. The books came into his hands covered with grime and full of dust, printed in cheap ink that blackened his fingertips on porous yellowed paper that crumbled at the edges or broke if it was folded. He had to pick up every one, flipping through it carefully, his filthy, chapped thumb releasing a slow cascade of pages, each falling alone, and only when he was satisfied the book was empty could he perform the main task of tearing the old covers off, savagely, and flinging them away. This was the job as Fran explained it to him. Fran was haggard, straight-backed, perhaps seventy, with the stringy body of a boy and a halo of thinned hair the exact color of parchment paper. She gave him his instructions with the contemptuous resentment of a person who would rather do everything, no matter how degrading, herself. She called the work “cleaning.” The unstripped books came heaped in a canvas sack stretched on a rolling metal frame which was so deep that the level of books would sink below his reach, even when he hung over the edge, and then he would have to fish clumsily in it with the dustpan stuck onto the end of the broom. At the end of his first day he asked Fran what he was looking for, exactly, when he flipped to make sure the book was empty. Sometimes a crushed beetle slid out, or crumbs.
“Money,” she said angrily. He could see she didn’t like him. Although she oversaw the work on every floor, the trimming and stitching and gluing, she had repeatedly come to his area, a great vaulted space like a garage at the bottom and back of the building, where the loading doors were, and stared at him.
“Money?” he asked.
“People stick money in books and forget. They do it all the time. And when you find it you give it to me, you don’t keep it. That’s stealing,” she said, provocatively.
“I haven’t found no any money.”
“You’ve been doing this all day.”
He shook his head helplessly.
“You’re likely to find some every day. I’ve done every job in this place and when I did this job I found money in books every day,” she said, and stalked out of the room.
He hated this work more than anything he’d ever done in his life. It was dirty and tedious, and he was always alone. The silence in the tall, hot room rang in his ears. He found a hooked pole and learned to cantilever the huge windows open, and on clear days a warm breeze wound around him while he worked and seemed to touch him with moist molecules from the nearby, invisible lake. He pretended to be a machine, flipping and ripping in time to an annoying tattoo that established itself in his head and began to coincide with his footsteps and the way he ate his eggs at the cafeteria counter. It beat within him all night while he lay in his sagging, prickly rooming-house bed, kept awake by the absence of sound, and it even reached him when he managed to sleep, so that he dreamed of work, and woke more exhausted than ever. He tried to skip the flipping but he couldn’t. The one or two times he succeeded the transgression required such a summoning of will it slowed him down, and afterwards his eyes kept straying to the tainted book as it was slowly covered over, until, when it was nearly out of sight, he yanked it out and angrily searched it. Fran’s surveillance was constant, petulant, and threatening. Because she was the only person he saw with any regularity she took on an inflated, morbid role in his thoughts. He tried to imagine her as a young woman, as a married woman, as a person with a home of her own, and each time her figure would rise up, unaltered and perfectly obscene against whatever backdrop he’d chosen. His eyes constantly ached. He looked at endless blurry fans of pages, roughly ten books every minute. Sometimes when he ripped he lost hold and the book went flapping through the air. Whenever Fran came she first stood behind him for an interminable minute as if she thought he couldn’t sense that she was there. “I used to do this,” she whined. “I used to find two-dollar bills. All the time.” He rarely looked straight in her face because when he did he noticed an unhealthy wetness in her eyes, like the oozing from a poorly healed wound. He began to long to find money to give her. The things he did find he preserved carefully, signs of his perseverance. A bleached “Admit One” movie ticket. A yellow cash register tape whose purple numbers had bled, a piece of string, an empty envelope, the hairy hind leg of a bug. He found a crushed four-leaf clover the color of tea, eased it out with the tip of his finger and dropped it into his breast pocket. When he left the bindery at night he lay his findings on the sill of his rooming-house room. He was surprised by the things that could fit in the bodies of books. A scrap of paper that said, “Jean, I Love You.” A greasy feather. A postcard of Portland, Oregon, written all over, even straight across the picture, in a feverish, illegible hand. He stopped dead and tried to decipher it and when Fran appeared he held it out toward her and she slapped it away. “Are you stealing from me?” she shrieked. “Slanty-eyed son of a bitch!”
The next day he took an old, soft dollar from his wallet and straightened it against the table edge. It felt buff and clingy. He sniffed it guiltily and smelled metal and powdery mold and a tang from the ink, or perhaps only dirt. Then he closed his eyes and put the bill in a book and put the book back in his bin and worked all morning calmly, unexpectantly, until the bill leaped out at him and he sighed with relief. He could never have missed such a thing. He lay the book open on the table, unstripped, exactly as he’d found it, and when Fran came she snatched the bill up. “It’s usually more. It’s usually a big bill, like someone wouldn’t want to carry, but then they forget, or they die,” she said, rushing away.
The flipping sent an endless plume of dust into his face. Black scum built up in his nostrils. His hands never came clean. When he drew breath he began to make a sound like a wet rag caught in a fan. His tuberculosis had battered his lungs and he had always smoked, with the sense that the acrid smoke burned his lungs clean. Now he smoked even more, to kill the musty taste that filled his mouth, although at the back of the taste there was something he relished. Completely separate, insignificant things became linked just by coinciding in time, and together they insisted on themselves and the moment that joined them. He had no reason to think of a cheap cut-glass bowl, just $3.95 not-available-in-any-store, every time a passing truck or the trains made the bindery shudder so slightly that perhaps just his heart noticed, quickening. But he had once sat in the USIS office paging idly, longingly, through a Time magazine, and though he’d hardly registered what lay before him on the page when he felt the impact of the bombing, miles north, touch the chair that he sat in, later the memory of his fear was always strangely presided over by that bowl, with its white blaze of light. The smell of dust that soaked into everything, turning his pores black, weighting his clothes, brought before him the cluster of dirty fake flowers that sat in a vase on the telephone table at Strake, and the sound of her voice.
By the time his first weekend arrived he had a chronic cough. It roared up from the bottoms of his lungs as if it was bringing blood and tissue with it. He’d been at the job for four days. This was when the delusion of unchanging eternity left him and his awareness of the jerky motions of time returned with renewed intensity. He woke up early on Saturday morning, and bought coffee and cigarettes and a cellophane packet of cheap stationery with matching envelopes. He was living in an arid, treeless part of the city that was mostly storage warehouses and other windowless, unpeopled places. He longed for some noise made by humans, but the streets were deserted, and he’d grown afraid that his rooming house was perfectly empty apart from him. The desolation he felt was reflected by the building itself. It was only six stories high, yet it towered over everything around it. From his window he could see the tarred rooftops stretching away in every direction, and to the north the sudden wall of skyscrapers. The lake was a pale blue line. He stood still, remembering the thrill of arrival he’d felt when he’d first glimpsed that water. Then, inspired by his eagerness to get out of the room, he wrote two perfunctory letters. They came effortlessly, like letters to strangers he never expected to meet. He had nothing to say. The first was to Bower, reporting that he had arrived safely and taken up the job and that he found Chicago very nice. He wrote on every other line, as usual, although this time to take up space more than to ensure he could be read. His script still spread across the page with mathematical precision. He felt he hadn’t seen it in a long time. “I don’t feel any troubles at all,” he concluded, and then, with an inch left, he thanked Bower again, and signed his name.
The letter to Katherine was even emptier. “I hope you are happy and well,” he wrote. It was easy. “I am enjoying myself very much.” He gazed down at this performance with some amazement. But he also knew, as he carefully printed his return address in the corner of the envelope, that this was something he might have not done. He had to go outside to make sure of the building number.
The El ran north-south above State Street a few blocks away, and after he’d mailed his letters he walked to the Roosevelt stop and climbed onto the northbound platform, walking as far north as it went. He knew from his map that Chinatown lay further to the south but he didn’t care. He wanted to go back into the deep canyon of buildings. Looking down through the tracks and the steel fretwork to the street far below he remembered the Evansville bridge. The day was hot and clear and quiet. The tracks stretched straight away like a floating road, and the approaching train was visible for a long time. When it arrived he got into the first car and sat in the first seat, in the forward-facing window. The tracks vanished beneath him and the distant wall of buildings grew steadily larger until he could see where the tracks would cut through them. The level plain of roofs to either side sprouted billboards and lone oversized buildings and then the solid mass of downtown was upon them and the tracks were enclosed. Windows of offices and sweatshops and warehouses were so close to the train that he could see deep within them. Every row of windows at train level was crowded with trash, plain paper to block the view or printed advertisements or homemade signs declaring love. He couldn’t choose where to look. The train was crowded now and several children pushed past him to press their faces to the front window. He had gotten on board with no clear idea of where he would get off and no real desire to, but after the train passed out the far side of downtown and shuddered through a sharp turn inland he got off and walked east along Division. At Lake Shore Drive he had to cross through a tunnel because the traffic didn’t stop, and as the tunnel’s mouth widened he saw a mob, hot dog carts, girls in swimsuits and floppy straw hats, bicycles, and he was standing on the beach.
He walked north, carried along by the crowds. He stopped sometimes, to gaze over the lake. It was as vast as an ocean, blue and featureless until it drew close to the shore, where it swelled with small whitecaps. In the midst of this brightness he was a thin, dark, irregular figure. He was wearing the same cheap suit, his one preserved set of clothes. He could feel the heat of the day building up in his trousers and shoes. He took off his jacket and sat on top of a picnic table facing the water, smoking. At first he’d been self-conscious, feeling overdressed and funereal, but while the gaze of every person he saw roved constantly, hungrily, no one’s gaze seemed to rest on him. He was surrounded and invisible. Dear Katherine, he thought. There is an ocean here.
He didn’t know how long he had been sitting this way when he felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned to see an Oriental man, his age, in an open-necked shirt with his stiff hair forced into a pompadour, speaking Japanese to him. “It’s pretty good,” the man said, handing him a card, and before he understood what was happening he heard his own Japanese saying “Thank you,” and the man had sauntered away, looking around, with a stack of the cards in his hand. The card was printed in Japanese but it was concise and he took it in quickly—exclusive massage house, only Japanese girls, rates according to type of room and length of time, from fifteen minutes to the night. To preserve exclusiveness interested persons should inquire with the manager of the Lakeview Hotel, North Clark Street, Little Tokyo.
He didn’t question whether, sitting there hunched with a cigarette, from time to time doubled over from coughing, in a cheap, dark suit on a blazing summer day staring past acres of sunbathers, anything about him other than his being Oriental had compelled the man to give him such a card; he only took the card as a clue, fallen into his hands, and he followed it. He retraced his steps to the El and asked the token seller for directions. “Welcome to Chicago!” the man said excitedly. Riders crowded the platform, red-faced from the beach, hefting shopping bags, whistling. The train came quickly and he rode it to Belmont, descending the stairs from the platform straight into an entire vegetable market packed beneath the shade cast by the tracks, Japanese women yelling at vendors, Japanese children chewing hard caramels, glowing logs of pickled radish, bricks of tofu sunk in buckets. The Lakeview Hotel was a regular boardinghouse occupied entirely by Japanese men who lined the narrow stoop, smoking, and filled the broken armchairs in the lobby. No one blinked at him. Overflowing ashtrays stood everywhere. Signs in Japanese tacked to the walls irritably barred from the premises all unapproved women, children, dogs, filth, and gambling. He had thrown the card away outside, not wanting to be misunderstood, but now he saw the same cards scattered everywhere, and piled on the ledge of the manager’s window. The rooms were half as big as his room near the bindery, with lumpy Murphy beds, fraying lamp cords, stained carpets, and they were dark, loud, fouled with cigarette smoke and mildew, and they cost more, with extra charges for hot plates and garbage removal, and just one bathroom, with no lock, per floor. “If you want a woman, you have to talk to me,” the manager told him. “I’ll arrange it. Bringing your own woman here would be like bringing your own food to my restaurant.” He moved the same night, packing his suitcase Crane-style, by the fistful. He left his artifacts of book trash on the sill, except for the postcard from Portland and the four-leaf clover, which he closed into his dictionary, and then he returned his key and marched away from that grim, lonely place; but just before he left he printed his new address on a sheet of notepaper and left it with the manager, in case he got mail.
Now he rode the El to work, a forty-minute trip the whole length of the city, rattling, sublime, the white morning light pouring in off the lake and the gold evening light from the west. He bought novels in the Japanese bookstore and read them on the train, or lay his head against the glass and watched the complicated inexhaustible city scroll by, a landscape he could never memorize although he lovingly tried. Every morning he chose to go down to the bindery, and because he felt he didn’t have to, because he was certain, now, that there were so many ways he could slip into life, he didn’t mind. His room was too dark and noisy to read and so he lived outside, in tea shops and restaurants or on the steps of his hotel, a member of the legion of do-nothing smokers. One night, while he was sitting in the Belmont Noodle House with a bowl of udon and his calculus open in front of him, the waiter leaned over his shoulder to look at his book. “Hey, Einstein,” he said, raising his eyebrows. And from then on, in the noodle house, and then at his hotel, and even, sometimes, on the street, the neighborhood people grinned at him. “Sensei Einstein,” they said. He’d been adopted.
His Japanese was grammatically arcane, the Japanese he’d been taught as a child and had done absolutely nothing to remember, but it wasn’t long before the constant effort with which he kept himself thinking and speaking in English collapsed. He was submerged in the other language and he couldn’t resist it. It soaked into him, found his reservoir of schoolboy Japanese and completely corrupted it. When he was asleep he dreamed in Japanese. When he was awoken by mistaken drunken banging on his door he swore filthily in Japanese before he even knew where he was. It was strange that his homesickness was banished by a place that reminded him of the only other time he had been homesick. His childhood Japanese lessons had all been aimed toward the year he would be sent to boarding school in Osaka, and when that occasion arrived he’d been fluent in the stiff, terrorized Japanese that only a foreign child would speak. He’d done miserably, an early failure he wasn’t allowed to forget. “Collaboration is outweighed by opportunity,” his father would lecture him. “Take the police. They have the power now, but when the Japanese leave, what do they have? The hatred of the people, and ignorance. We’ll have the knowledge.” His father had always known the period of Japanese rule would end, and then the country would have to remake itself. The Japanese did almost everything to hobble native leadership but they enjoyed the practice of favoritism, and that was their weakness: someday they would leave, and leave in their wake, accidentally, some educated men. If it didn’t happen in his own generation, his father reasoned, it would happen in the generation after. Chang was sent to boarding school bearing the frightening weight of that national duty, and the idea that this was an exalting flame that should make fuel of misery. But he’d only been eight years old. Obedience was a reflex but duty was abstract and quickly obliterated by his desperate, inexperienced unhappiness. His careful speech was scorned, his uniform stolen; he was beaten in the bathroom and falsely accused of small crimes. And then World War II came, like a godly intervention, and he was sent home.
In Little Tokyo he was treated like a shabby aristocrat. Doing his shopping at the street market under the El he would be offered cigarettes or bean cakes or cold cans of beer. When there was an eviction notice or a jury summons he was sought out to read it and comment. “You ought to be a lawyer and quit with these numbers. We need a lawyer, not an Einstein,” they said. But they seemed proud of his unpragmatic erudition. “Einstein!” people called as he passed by, in his increasingly greasy suit coat. “Sit down here. Stop walking around like a cop.” On Cub game days he and the men from his hotel walked up Clark to the stadium El stop and watched the game from the platform for the cost of a token, eating bento-box lunches, drinking beer, clambering onto each other’s shoulders when the action moved inevitably to the right outfield, hidden from them by the stands. They brought a transistor radio with them, and he translated the play-by-play commentary into his awkward Japanese. If these people knew he was Korean, they didn’t seem to care. Arriving Filipinos were eagerly courted by Japanese massage-house proprietors, and Japanese teenagers rode the El to Chinatown to work in the restaurants. Old prejudices were irrelevant and unprofitable. Many of the families in the neighborhood who weren’t new immigrants had lived in California before being interned during World War II, and their only loyalty now was to the generous Midwest, where it seemed that anyone could do anything. He felt that way, too. Obedience might be a reflex, but he’d dodged it before. He thought of his father, experimentally, and then Peterfield. They seemed as remote as Dean Bower, or Bill Crane, or Katherine Monroe. He repeated her name to himself until it sounded empty and nonsensical, an unknown thing named by an unknown, unbeautiful language. It occurred to him, for the first time in his entire life, that he didn’t have to be a student. There were endless other ways to live, endless other lives he could take, without waiting for church councils or Dean Bowers or a gracious invitation. He could stay here and get another job, in a restaurant, even at a casino. The men from his hotel had taught him poker and he wasn’t just good at it, he was, he dared to think, occasionally brilliant. “You’ve never played poker before?” they asked, incredulously.
“No,” he grinned. He was winning.
“Beginner’s luck.”
“I think he’s faking.”
“If he’s faking he deserves to win your money, because he’s faking so well.”
“We’re not playing for money,” one said loudly, to be overheard by the manager. They were playing for rice crackers: plain broken, plain whole, and seaweed-wrapped, which stood in for nickel, dime, and quarter. After the game they were going to the Happi Sushi Restaurant and Bar, to settle mutual debts.
“You have a poker face, Einstein. I can’t believe you’ve never put it to its most sacred use.”
“A poker face?”
“It’s impossible to tell what you’re thinking.” A few children had gathered around where the card table sat on the sidewalk, beside the steps to the hotel. One of them, a small boy, made the rounds, examining each player’s cards with great seriousness, and then withdrawing to consult with his companions, whispering behind a hand. One of the players jerked his chin at the boy. “Like that kid. He knows if he gave away anything while he was looking at our cards, we’d spank him to pieces.” The table was one of the hotel’s several, which lived, when not in use, folded flat against the lobby walls, or upside down with their legs sticking up, like stricken animals, on inconvenient patches of the floor.
“Do I really have a poker face?” Chuck asked.
“Absolutely.” Everyone nodded in unison, their eyes fixed on their cards.
He could no longer imagine the lack of imagination he’d arrived with. At the bindery he flipped sometimes and he skipped sometimes. He stood idly at the windows and watched the South Shore trains come and go. He planted another dollar, and briefly gained Fran’s confidence; but then she returned the next day, narrow again with suspicion. “I think maybe you found a big one and took it and put this small one in its place,” she said, waving the dollar accusingly. He almost laughed. Why give her anything at all? He still found forgotten artifacts in books, but they no longer held pathos for him, only varying interest. He found a love letter, still holding its scent, and pressed his face to it.
He kept studying, filling yellow legal pads with calculus. He worked in ink, to preserve his rare mistakes. The problems unfurled like chains, joined into webs, propagated through space. His enjoyment was as pure as he imagined making music must be. Once he’d loved to lose himself in the particularity of a language, among the strange names for long-known and intimate things, and the strange things he had not known at all, until their names found him. Now he swept all that arcana aside. The arcana of math trumped it all. Its crystalline structure reached into the heavens and down to invisible atoms, infinite with chances and yet absolutely true, and just by knowing this, in one way he had mastered it. No threshold loomed ahead, demanding to be crossed. Nothing measured and valued his progress. He thought of what Kim had said years ago about his destiny, and laughed with amazement. How did you know that? he wondered, as he gazed out of the El at the grid of the city, or into the glare on the noodle shop’s window. He had the sense that, after having walked upwind so long that he’d grown used to the implacable resistance, the wind had changed direction and sailed him forward. He finished the book he’d brought with him and spent one Saturday riding all over Chicago looking for another one. Any day in which he worked problems was worthy, and complete. He could not see an accumulation of understanding but he could sense it, and it buoyed him up. He remembered the time he had felt that his future depended upon performing flawlessly at a succession of gates, and being judged, and allowed to advance. This idea was no longer his. He knew what he was meant to do, and wasn’t he doing it? He was surrounded by people who struggled mightily and viciously and independently each day and they took him for the thing he dreamed of being, a scholar. “Ask Einstein,” they said. “He should know.” At the Belmont Noodle House he was allowed to sit for hours with his books, his empty bowl shoved aside, his teacup kept endlessly full, although the restaurant had just a handful of tables. His very presence transformed the place into a library. So he was a scholar, because that was what he did. He’d discovered the power to make himself, to throw away what he hated and say what he was. He didn’t think he wanted anything more.
June turned into July. This was his first Independence Day in America and he woke with a sense of occasion. Sticks of TNT were exploding up and down North Clark Street by eight in the morning. He sat on the front steps of his hotel watching as one small picnic expedition after another assembled its equipment with a flurry of holiday urgency and waddled off toward the lake. The bindery was closed. He sat on the steps until the damp late-morning heat overpowered him and then he went upstairs again. He tried to work on his calculus but the day stretched before him, and the contented hush that lay beneath its noises. He went to the zoo in Lincoln Park and lagged from cage to cage, hands jammed in his pockets, barely aware of the animals, the heat, the ripe smell. He wandered from there to the Oak Street Beach, and from the Oak Street Beach to the Navy Pier, but everywhere he went there were people together, leaning on each other’s shoulders or crouching around picnic baskets. He returned to his hotel.
It was nearly evening now, and the miscellaneous habitués of the Lakeview had begun to pull the battered card tables and metal folding chairs and plastic buckets full of ice onto the sidewalk. He hurried forward gratefully. One of his neighbors handed him a beer in a sodden paper bag. “Ready to win big, Einstein?” He just shook his head and laughed. Even among them, he felt suddenly, incurably alone. The manager was standing at the top of the steps repeating “no gambling, no gambling inside, no gambling outside,” while someone elbowed past him feeding an electrical cord onto the sidewalk, and plugged in a radio. Now they heard the tinny and exalted sound of the philharmonic orchestra playing live in the park. There would be fireworks after the sun went down. When the manager saw Chuck he motioned and Chuck followed him into the sudden darkness of the lobby. “Letter for you. It came yesterday but I didn’t see you, always slipping in and out, Mr. Quiet.” The envelope had a Sewanee postmark and no return address. From the date he could see it had languished at his old rooming house a long time before being forwarded. June 11, 1956. He turned it over and read, scrawled carelessly across the flap, Addison.
Dear Mr. Ahn,
I didn’t know you had arranged to spend your summer in Chicago, but now that I do I must congratulate you on your wisdom in getting away from this sleepy mountain to someplace where there’s a little life. Chicago is a terrific city, as I remember it, although I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t been there in years.
I’m writing to thank you on Katherine’s behalf for your letter. I assume you didn’t know she’s returned to New Orleans, where her mother is ill. I’ve sent your letter on to her there. It was thoughtful of you to write and I really do encourage you to continue. Any news from her friends cheers her up.
On a happier note, it occurs to me that Katherine and I might soon find ourselves indebted to you for solving a dilemma. So far we’ve had no luck agreeing on what city should have the honor of hosting our wedding. Now that you’ve brought up Chicago, though, I can’t imagine a better place. Best,
At the bottom, her New Orleans address.
The next day, Fran was waiting for him. “I came here yesterday and I cleaned books for an hour and you know what I found?” He was shaking his head, and when she snapped a ten-dollar bill before his face with both hands, he kept shaking it.
“You dirty shifty lying little punk,” she said. “I’m going to get you.”
All that afternoon he hardly saw what he did. With his mind so distracted his earliest habits returned, and he flipped through each volume languidly, hearing the distant flutter of the pages and the broad ripping sound as he pulled off the covers. He might not have even looked down, but out the east windows, into the blinding glare beneath which he knew was the field of tracks for the Illinois Central. The day was so still he thought he could hear the sounds of the bindery filtering down to him: the dirty edges of the books being shaved off, the rhythmic punctures from the stitching machines. For the rest of the day Fran left him in peace. She never once came to disturb him.
He had read Addison’s letter so many times he’d memorized it inadvertently, and the sound of that man’s voice was more present to him than the sounds of himself as he worked. He felt change impending. His life here was shrinking, relinquishing space to what had always lay around it. He had known, at the back of his intoxicating happiness here, that he would never really stay. He already saw this room as he would in the future, remembering it. The sun receded and then the rail yard was visible, gleaming like a river. South of the city its tributaries branched off, the South Shore Line clinging to the lakeshore, the other lines reaching everywhere like roots to the east, west, and south. He drifted back to the bin and fished a new book out of it with the dustpan stuck onto the end of the broom. He was working very slowly. He might not even reach the bottom of the sack. The pages softly riffled in his hands and sent a puff of dust upward. His face was turned toward the window and he didn’t cough; still, he had seen something, and when he flipped back, a hundred-dollar bill stood in the crease. He took the bill out and examined it closely, never having seen one before. Ben Franklin was on the front: scientist, printer, inventor, a brash unruly person. On the back of the bill was a fastidious drawing of a building labeled Independence Hall. It was not yet five o’clock. The bill was stiff, but it was also wrinkled. It might have been there any length of time. He lifted his chin, trying to listen harder, but now he heard nothing. When he went to the door and looked behind it there was nobody there. He folded the bill, regretting marring it this way, and walked out the loading doors to the street and rode the El back north to Little Tokyo with the gold western light pouring on him. He used to think there was only one door, only one right answer to a problem. He hadn’t understood how many solutions were possible, awaiting the equations that would bring them into being. And so he did this, without caring to know how things might have been different, if he had found the money a week before he got the letter, or a week after, or not at all; if he had found the money and never gotten the letter, or if the letter had been from a different person, or of a different kind, without that supremely self-confident tone, which seemed to betray something.