The freighter dropped anchor off an unsettled strip of Cheju’s coast and sent its refugees to shore in overloaded rowboats. Chuck had come on deck looking frantically for what he expected, the teeming disorder and climbing roofs of Pusan harbor, and instead there had only been the waste of land creeping out from the foot of the cliffs, and an unpaved road winding out of sight around the bulk of a headland, the flat sky, and the screaming gulls. Once onshore people began making camp, digging pits and building fires, feeding them with garbage and wet kindling pulled out of the hills climbing up from the coast. A few U.S. Army-ROKA joint patrols arrived from the far side of the island with a small number of tents. After setting these up the soldiers got back into their jeeps and bumped around the field, holding their rifles ostentatiously over the sacks of rice they’d brought. They started arguments with those refugees who had set up their own tents and built fires inside them. The army-issue tents quickly filled up with piles of clothing, chickens, cripples, children. There hadn’t been stakes to pin the flaps down and these lifted in the cold wind, like blown skirts. It might have been warmer in the open air, where every fire became the hub of a wheel of bodies.
The camp had sprung up out of only the contents of the ship, but he knew that the following morning, as soon as it was light, the army would arrive in greater force to solidify it. In spite of the government’s efforts the guerrilla presence on Cheju had never completely disappeared. It persisted in small, isolated bands throughout 1949 and the first half of 1950, and after the war had broken out it was constantly enlarged, by people acting on the rumors that the network of caves sheltered army deserters and North Korean partisans who coordinated the guerrilla activity on the mainland, in the rear of the front line. National Police and ROKA units patrolled the island constantly, picking up young unenlisted men, older boys, surly trouser-wearing girls. All the risks he had run on the mainland were concentrated here. If he was still in the camp the next morning he would either be drafted or arrested. He saw no able-bodied men at all: only girls, women, cripples leaning on sticks, and sexless children, unattached to anyone, deeply self-absorbed and hungry, trotting on the lookout for food.
As the evening turned into night he kept picking his way in circles through the camp, wrapped in his great dark coat. Everywhere he went he was followed by eyes. His coat was expensive, conspicuous wool, and he was young, uninjured, and male, although he coughed incessantly, doubling over to spit clots of phlegm. He was running a fever, and the rich-looking cloak hid a swarm of lice. He had become infested on the boat. Walking, he pulled his arms out of the huge sleeves and his hands scrabbled inside his shirt, trying to claw the vermin off his body, but they seemed to have burrowed just beneath his skin to feed, like ticks. The itching was terrible but the constant awareness of infestation was worse. He flailed as he walked, like a lunatic. He paused briefly at one fire and was given a handful of undercooked rice. Eating it he tasted feces on his fingers. “What are you doing here?” a woman asked him. “How are you not in the army?” Gulls were wheeling overhead, inflamed by the ripe smell of garbage that was carried upward by the warm drafts from the fires, in spite of the cold air. He could see their pale, bulletlike shapes, lit up from below. “I have contagious tuberculosis,” he said, hoping this would make a space of wordless loathing around him, but the eyes didn’t waver.
He waited until sleep overtook the camp and then he slipped away from the field of prone bodies and walked into the woods. There he took off his coat and shirt, quaking from the cold, and banged the shirt with a rock. His panic erupted. He banged so hard he broke a sweat. He could hear his breath bursting out of him, like steam from a valve. When he was done the shirt was peppered with his own blood, smashed out of the insects, but when he put it back on, it still crawled. The lice were living in his coat, on his head, in the safe thatch of his pubic hair, under his arms. He didn’t return to the camp. Instead, he stood leaning on the trunk of a large tree all night, sometimes grinding himself against it like a dog, to ease the itching, but mostly standing, letting it support him. His eyes had adjusted when he left the open slope, blazing with fires, for the dark trees. Now they grew even keener, and he could see the delicate tracery of the undergrowth, the bare interlocking canopy, the roosting shapes of birds. His breathing grew even and calm. His heart throbbed within him, firmly held, his flesh conveying the pulse to the soles of his feet, and out, into the ground. He heard the wind moving in the needles of pines, and beneath that irregular noise, the constant washing sound of the ocean.
When the sky grew pale he climbed the tree and tried to sleep, but his fear he might fall kept him awake. He sat in the tree all day, growing numb from the cold, and that night began walking. He walked for three nights, always keeping the sound of the ocean to his left so that he would not stray inland and become lost. During the day he slept in dead leaves or under low shrubs. Although he saw no one, his vigilance never relaxed. It wouldn’t have surprised him to stumble upon another filthy, starving, and paranoid person curled up in the mulch that he plowed through each morning to bury himself. He ate bark, and the lice from his body. His gums bled continuously; wiggling one of his teeth as he walked, it came out. It lay on his tongue, a little claw with a spongy root.
On the third day, crashing like a drunk through the trees, he heard a church bell striking discordantly. It was late morning. The bell gave him eleven baleful notes to follow and he rushed downhill toward it, seeing the scrolled shingles of rooftops before the sound died away. He entered the village clumsy with incompetent precaution, inching along the side of a building with his arms flung out for balance as if he teetered on a ledge, but the village was motionless. The weight of illness or stupor hung over it. Children lay asleep in the street. The church building stood at the head of a dusty square, anomalously European and solid, and ornamented by a pair of stone pillars that he might have wondered sarcastically about, imagining them ferried from the mainland by a platoon of missionaries, if he hadn’t been mindless from hunger. Very slowly, trying to make no noise, he opened the door and immediately met a wall of bodies. It was a food line, winding back from the altar and bending past the entrance. He pushed his way in.
The line shuffled forward by inches. He was almost asleep when he reached the priest, a smooth-faced, hesitant-looking white man, perhaps no more than twenty. Chuck realized he had no bowl and cupped his hands, losing the water the potato had been boiled in. He hurried to a wall and wolfed the food, lapped his palms, sucked his fingers dry. Now the taste of his own filth on his hands made him dizzy with food-lust. He looked like a mad hermit, the coat crusted with mud, bark, bugs, the skeletons of leaves, his fingernails black with dirt, his mouth colorless.
He lingered hungrily at the edge of the room and watched the rest of the line labor past, his fingers playing desirously against his palms. It wouldn’t have been so difficult to force his way past these people and take another potato. Each human in the line was a mindless segment, seemingly impassive, except for the barely perceptible, unyielding pressure by which first a tottering old man, and then a girl of about six, were squeezed out of the line by those behind them. If the priest was aware of what had happened he did not show it. The food dwindled and disappeared, but for some time the priest continued to dip his ladle into the pot, filling cups with the gray, starchy water. The pot looked like army issue: scratched aluminum with a pair of metal handles. When the ladle scraped bottom the people who had not yet been fed lingered uncertainly, tilting empty bowls as if something might fall from the ceiling. Finally they melted away. He stayed, watching the priest through the fringe of his hair. His hair had become streaked with gray. The whites of his eyes, he would see later, staring into the priest’s small, flaking mirror, were yellow, the precise shade of phlegm. The priest’s head and shoulders sloped forward even when he was not bent over the soup pot. His sad movements through the bare chamber, extinguishing candles, were led by his forehead. When the room was dark except for a tin-can oil lamp he was holding, the priest lifted the pot under one arm and forced himself to face the lingerer. “Go home?” the priest asked, in Korean.
Chuck answered in English. “Tell me your name.”
The priest’s eyes widened with fear. He had been guiding AWOL soldiers, leftist guerrilla farmers, teenaged boys who could very well have been Soviet agents for all he knew, from the gateway of this village into the island’s hidden caves for almost fifteen months, since before the beginning of the war, and he had never been questioned before. In part, he thought, because he refused to know any more than he had to about the people he met. He had become a priest who refused to take confessions. “I’m Frank Todaro,” he said. “I’m a Catholic priest from Cleveland, Ohio. I’m here to help these people, that’s all. I don’t know anything. I’m not on any side.”
“I’m not on any side.”
“What do you want?”
“Take me to the place,” he said. “Hide me.”
That evening Todaro deloused him. He stood naked in the washtub as Todaro carried water in and boiled it, using the same pot in which he’d boiled that day’s ration of potatoes. The room they were in had a trapdoor to the cellar, where the grain and potatoes were stored. Todaro slept with a gun beside his bed which he had only fired once, taking it to the beach and shooting straight out to sea so he would not hit anyone, to be sure that he could. He added the steaming water to the washtub, thinning the black soup Chuck’s body had made. Then Todaro gave him a pair of scissors and Chuck clipped his pubic hair, and scrubbed himself with kerosene until his genitals were red and the coarse stubble stood out hideously. Again he was riveted and saddened by the stuff of his flesh. After he had bathed, Todaro seated him in a chair and sheared him to the scalp. As the matted locks fell the priest said, “The hills above this village are just like your head. Swarming with creatures, and all of them perfectly hidden. There’s no way to get them out apart from cutting down the trees.”
“I’ll be safe there?”
“There, yes. But you can’t stay up there all the time or you’ll starve.”
They left the mission after midnight, in the dead hour. The wind stood still. The snap of a twig carried for miles like the report of a pistol. He followed Todaro, for a long time no more than a dark motion, until they entered a gorge and suddenly, where the rift in the trees allowed the moonlight to fall on them, he could see the other man again, moving with remarkable agility in his heavy skirts, his scalp glowing through his downy hair. They shrank against the rock face, into the margin of shadow, walking on the level, dry streambed. He heard the waterfall before they saw it, a thin, persistent stream dripping between long teeth of ice. Behind it the rock was eaten away in the shape of a small amphitheater; crouching in the total darkness of this shelter the curtain of ice and the open gorge beyond seemed to blaze with light. There was no natural cave here, but the mouth of a tunnel. They had to feel, crawling blindly on all fours, to find it. “Are you claustrophobic?” Todaro asked him. The opening felt about as wide as a barrel. Its walls were dry, powdery, as cold as metal to the touch.
“Tell me what it will be.”
“This continues for a quarter of a mile, slightly uphill, and then joins with a natural cave. The tunnel widens very slightly sometimes, enough to crawl, but for most of it you’ll need to wriggle on your stomach. It’s tight.”
“Okay.”
“After this, as much as possible, you know nothing of me, and I know nothing of you. It’s safest for us both that way. This is the only place I have ever been shown. If your friend has moved from here I don’t know where he’ll be.”
As Todaro was turning to leave Chuck said, “Why do you do this?” expecting the answer to be, As a man of God I have a duty; All human life is a sacrament; War is a sin.
“You people don’t touch my stores. Didn’t I say that? My stores are off limits to you. My rice, my potatoes, my poultry. If I am ever robbed, I give this place up.”
He watched Todaro slip past the gleaming teeth of ice. For some time after the other man had gone Chuck remained motionless, listening to the quick percussion of the thread of water striking down on the stones, like his butterfly pulse. Then he closed his eyes and pushed himself into the tunnel.
He had never meant to come to Cheju. The history of his actions over the course of the war consisted of lucky accidents and terrible blunders ameliorated by lucky accidents. He was still shocked by his own failure to leave Seoul, although he knew, at the back of his memory, in the place where he consciously sought to exclude humiliations and heartbreaks from thought, that he had stayed out of loyalty to Peterfield and selfish, naive excitement. He had imagined phones ringing, wires keening and sawing like a flock of locusts, pounding feet, the focused, angry, crucial work of urgent dispatches. He’d had boyish ideas of covering the war, enclosed in the American machine. He’d seen too many movies. His resolution of loyalty to himself had been a punishment. It cut hard against the grain of what he wanted, of what would give him comfort. The night that Miki brought him the message from Kim, he had tried to close his ears to the finer points of it. His first reaction, even before his stunned gratitude to learn that Kim was alive, had been disciplined scorn: joining Kim was a romantic, suicidal daydream that didn’t even belong to the realm of ideas. He would go to Pusan, as he should have done in the first place. But he had decided to stay with Peterfield, and been abandoned by him, and he had decided to spurn Kim, and instead been thrust onto the island from which Kim had sent word. He was superstitious by nature, an optimistic propitiator of luck and a passive fatalist. He began to suspect he was at the mercy of a force of correction.
The cave was a great, cold lung, a space of utter darkness that throbbed, invisibly, with breathing. It was full of sleepers. When he pulled himself out of the tunnel, scraping desperately against its closeness and then suddenly falling unmoored into space, he heard a match strike. In the tunnel he had made himself a void, a nothing encased in a body, carried by the body’s steady humping, writhing progress but in no other way touched by it. Simply carried. Then he felt the breath of the larger space curl down to him, and went mad with claustrophobia. Even when he reached that space, he would be buried in the ground. The yellow globe of light cast by the match struck every wall of the cave, and the three other men, awake now. The cave continued, narrowing again, into another chamber. Its natural mouth was a mile away, on the opposite side of the hill. The men raised themselves on elbows and watched him from beneath heavily lidded eyes. They were filthy, like him, but dressed in farmers’ loose pajamas, and straw slippers. This cave was a haven for men who were wanted by the police or for desertion, but it was also a gateway; beyond it lay a network that encompassed the island. The physical connections between the underground chambers were few. If one was found, it could be cut off from the others and abandoned. The man holding the match could clearly see the quality of his coat, even through its grimy camouflage.
“Who are you?”
“I’m looking for someone named Kim. Kim Jaesong. He was here.”
“He’s not here anymore.”
“He might be somewhere else?”
“I don’t know.” The other men were squinting at Chuck skeptically. The man with the match said, “Todaro brought you?”
“Yes.”
“This Kim told you to look for Todaro.”
“Yes.”
“Well, this Kim isn’t here.”
“But he was.”
After a moment the man said, “I think so. I never asked him his name.”
“What did he look like?”
“Like you.”
“How so?”
“He dressed like you.” The man raised his chin, denoting Chuck’s coat. “He wore fancy shoes. Good leather shoes, made with nails.”
“Did they look like European shoes? They would have had a pattern in the leather, like little holes.”
“They didn’t have holes. They were nice shoes. Rich-looking.”
“No, the holes would have been decorative. A pattern.”
The man was shaking the match out. They all vanished into darkness again. “I never looked that close.”
“Please. Light another match. Was there a piece at the toe, stitched like this?”
“Yes,” the man said.
“There was?”
“Yes. Now I’m sure this was him.”
“But what did he look like?”
The man shrugged dismissively. “It was him. He was like you. He talked like you.”
“How long ago did he leave?”
“I don’t know. In the fall. But you can stay here.”
“Will you take me to the other caves?”
“You can stay here,” the man said again, with finality. Knowledge propagated in relay, by inches, formed message chains, and crept everywhere. But no one knew what lay beyond his grasp.
He lasted two weeks, maybe more, maybe less. He would never be sure how long this period of preparation was, during which his body preoccupied him entirely, its needs swelling to eclipse the world, shrinking slightly to admit the world again, the return of which only brought his body fresh needs and embarrassments. In those intervals of clarity and terror he looked for Kim, but he’d begun to suspect Kim had sent him the message to lure him to safety, and that Kim had already moved on. Kim would never hide for longer than he had to. He would be organizing, and fighting. And so Chuck’s vigil became as desperate and hopeless as it had been in the first months of the war, when he waited the whole occupation for Kim to appear. He slept curled in the cave, waiting, his coat coiled around him like a shroud, or he groped his way to the cave’s real mouth and slipped into the woods. He sucked icicles, threw himself on rabbits which bounded lightly away. And then he was finally starving, and he became a beggar, loping coyote-style through the streets of the coastal villages, emerging only after dusk. The torn hem of his coat trailed. His ears were always pricked for the sounds of a patrol, his nose high in the air, leading him.
His senses weren’t his anymore. They were exquisitely sharp now but he only carried them, like cold tools, in the same way that his body carried the cold void within it, which was nothing but emotionless awareness of itself, made by these senses which weren’t his. His eyes scanned the streets for Kim, but they were a dog’s eyes, indiscriminately interested in company. He lingered in kitchen doorways and stared at women until they were too frightened to refuse him food; there were no men left to protect them. As Langston had predicted, Seoul had fallen again, just days after Chuck had escaped. The Chinese and North Korean forces had advanced so far south that the only territories left from which the southern army could restock its forces were the peninsula’s southernmost tip and the offshore islands. Cheju’s villages were emptied of all their remaining boys, young men, older men who had no trouble walking, all of them rounded up by the American MPs and the National Police and gathered into blinking, silent crowds, straw sleeping mats or wool army-issue blankets rolled up and tied to their backs. Small children and women and the very old gathered in a crowd opposite and also stood wordlessly, a strange reflection, to watch them walk away in motley columns, without looking back. No one expected them to return. Their departure was a funeral, every man wearing or carrying his most cherished item of clothing, the thing he was willing to enter the next world attired in. Their best clothes: some owned real wool coats, aviator-style sunglasses, hats with bills or ear flaps, felt fedoras. Some had leather bags slung across their chests, fragile wire-rimmed glasses, American-made combat boots. Others wore only loose pajama-style shirts and pants, dark vests, canvas slippers, with lengths of cotton tied around their heads to warm their ears. If you were a man walking through one of these villages from which every man had been taken, then you were a ghost, or a beast. Women dropped bowls of rice on the ground and withdrew quickly, slamming their doors, as he leaped on the food. Thinking of finding Kim had been a way to mark time, but time stopped for him. He only wanted to gorge his body on hot food, slake his thirst, fall asleep overcome with the drunken sensation of having been fed. He excreted solid waste with tremendous pleasure and regret. When he was not dizzy and amnesiac from hunger he moved through the village streets deliriously, enthralled with his body’s continuance, forgetting more and more often to withdraw to the woods until twilight, falling asleep curled like a lover against the warm flank of a building, his hands squeezed between his legs, dreaming of food, shit, flesh, liquid. Preparing. At last he woke howling in pain; his hand had been yanked from its ardent embrace with his body and stamped into meat. There was still the boot on his hand, still stamping its heel, his flesh shredded back to the cool blue knuckle. When a second officer stepped forward and doused the wound with gasoline he fainted. He had been arrested by the National Police on suspicion of espionage. He woke up in the back of a bouncing jeep, screamed, and was clocked in the side of the head with the butt of a rifle.
He was put on a boat and sent to Pusan, to a detention center that had been made from a converted school building. While he was conscious he argued so strenuously for his release that he was repeatedly knocked out again. When he came to he would resume the litany, listing every superior he had ever had during his employment by the United States Army, naming Police Chief Ho, his uncle Lee, his father. “My father is in Pusan,” he sobbed, as his head snapped back. And then, the black mist moving aside again, he lunged forward, trying to butt the driver of the jeep. “Minister Su is a friend of my family,” he gibbered, “My father is a famous professor, my uncle is Congressman Lee,” rushing the words out before he was struck. He threatened his captors with jail. A used bandage was stuffed into his mouth, gooey with fluids. By the time he arrived at the school building both his eyes were swollen to slits. He wove when he walked. The ground seemed to be bucking up toward him. Inside the school building there were still maps on the walls, but scrolled up, and the windows were covered with tar paper. He was taken into a classroom that had been cut in half with a thin wood partition. At first he thought the classroom would be his cell. Later he understood that this never could have been the case, because the classroom had to be periodically withdrawn from him, so that he would live in fear of seeing it again.
On his first day he was beaten with a sawed-off length of wood left from the construction of the partition, and a baseball bat found leaning in a closet. Two soldiers beat him while an officer watched. The officer said, “Avoid his head.” When he fell to his knees he was kicked in the stomach, ribs, and buttocks. He bent his face into the cage of his forearms and went sliding back and forth across the floor. A boot tip hit his scrotum and he vomited a clear splash of liquid. “You’re a spy,” the officer said. “No,” he gasped. “First the lies come out,” the officer said, as if he were a doctor calmly talking his patient through a procedure. “Stand him up.”
The two soldiers stood him up and he crumpled. They stood him up again and one pushed the end of a rifle into the soft pocket of flesh beneath his jaw. Unknown reservoirs of strength opened in him and he continued to stand.
Now his body would fail him by enduring, to be damaged further, and by failing to endure, for which he would be damaged further. There was an exposed pipe bending into the room near the ceiling, covered with blisters of rust, steadily leaking dark rust-thickened water that looked like clotting blood. “Do you see that pipe?” the officer asked him. He nodded. “Point to it.” His arm lifted, jerking violently. “Salute the pipe,” suggested the officer. “Say, I salute you, pipe.” He said it, gurgling. A fire spread from the center of his back up the ropes of his arm, and down the backs of his legs. His kneecaps popped. One of the soldiers was dismissed. The other came and punched him in the sternum with his gun. He doubled over but did not fall. “Louder,” said the officer. He shouted again. He was made to stand perfectly still with his arm extended, shouting his salute to the pipe. He did not know how many times he shouted. He could not adjust his body, accommodate its pangs which quickly turned to blinding, unrememberable, voiding black pain. He fainted, waking as he struck the floor.
The officer stood over him. “Are you a spy?”
“No,” he said.
He was made to stand up again, immobile, with the arm extended, shouting his salute at the pipe. He could not endure the posture for more than a few minutes at a time without collapsing. Each time he did the officer told him he could remain lying down if he admitted that he was a spy. The soldier kicked him idly. He rose again, stood, saluted, fell, was questioned, kicked idly, made to stand. At the end of the day he was taken to a cell in the basement of the school building, on an empty hallway. The cell might have once been a cement shower stall, a few feet square, with a drain in the center of the floor and a stub of pipe extending out of the wall just beyond his reach, about a foot below the ceiling, with a threaded bolt set like a bar across its mouth. His right arm was handcuffed to this. He had to stand on his toes to keep the cuff from dislocating his wrist, but in spite of this he plunged into a deep sleep, and broke his wrist with the weight of his body.
The next morning he tried again. His wrist had swollen so astonishingly that the guard who retrieved him called a doctor. “My father is here in Pusan, my uncle is a congressman, I’m not a spy,” he told the doctor. His face was washing itself with tears, but these tears were like the tears the eye always produces to roll in its socket, they meant nothing to him. His purpose was to communicate his point to this doctor, who was a good man, an educated man, and must have taken some kind of oath to protect human life. The doctor said, gazing past him with mild surprise. “I think that is your father coming now,” and when he whirled to look the doctor squeezed the wrist, snapping the bone into place. His voice tore out of him unbelievingly. “Haaaaaaaaaaah…”
He was taken back to the classroom, with the wrist bound. He begged the officer to call Eighth Army headquarters, USIS, his father, the government. “What?” the officer said. “Are you talking? All I hear is blah blah blah blah!” Nothing he said was ever audible. “What?” the officer shouted, striking him across the face. He hadn’t been heard. He saluted the pipe until his voice was so strained he was nauseous. He was stood beneath the pipe, and made to throw his head all the way back, so that it screamed on its hinge, and then to swallow the rust-thickened drip. When he fell backwards he was punched in the sternum with the butt of the rifle, or the baseball bat, which stood in the corner when not in use, at an impudent angle, observing him. He would be allowed to stop swallowing if he admitted that he was a spy. When he screamed his own name, the name of his father, the name of his uncle, the two soldiers kicked his scrotum and buttocks, slapped him across the face with their gloves, stood him up, and pulled his head backwards by his hair until he thought his neck would break, while the officer said, “What? I don’t understand you. What language is this?” He was stood beneath the drip again and made to swallow, with his head thrown all the way back. The rusty water filled his mouth and ran in streams down his neck. He vomited again, like his gut being withdrawn through his throat. The officer strolled the perimeter of the room, dangling the baseball bat thoughtfully. “Are you a spy?” he asked. He wanted to know where the Communists were hiding on Cheju. The soldier’s rifle was resting against the soft pocket of flesh under his jaw and he was made to swallow his vomit, and the rust-thickened water. The sound the pipe made as it dripped was like a kind of incontinence.
That night he was given a piece of putrefying meat to eat; the next morning, when the guard found a pool of feces quivering on the floor of his cell he said, “Make that disappear,” and stood over him with his gun cocked while he pushed the waste through the grate of the drain. He was shackled by his left hand now. He learned to haul himself up by it, to gash the inside of his right forearm against the sharp end of the bolt. He made a new gash every night. The marks spread across his arm, crisscrossing sometimes, but still readable, like the lines on his palm. He did not know how else to keep track of time, and he was determined to control at least the passage of his body through time. He could not control anything else. He could not control what his body expelled, or even what it ingested. He was given cattle feed, and ridiculed as he wolfed it down. He was so hungry he ate whatever was given to him, no matter how rotten or inorganic. His body suffered from the lack of everything, and it convulsively took in material, in the same way it convulsively vomited. Five marks on his arm, then eight. Looking at them, he did not experience the duration they represented. He only felt the pain in his body and even this became a dome he lived inside of.
On the ninth day his jaws were held open, and the officer took a straight razor and made small cuts all over his tongue; then he was given a bowl of salt. He ate it, weeping. “Are you a spy?” the officer asked. He said he was. He could have said, so long ago, I am a spy. The officer unfolded a piece of paper in front of his face. There were words coursing across it. He was only watching them, not trying to read them. Words came from a world which did not exist. His face washed itself with tears that were made in the same unfeeling place where his urine was made, and his blood. It meant nothing to him. The officer gave him a pen but his hand couldn’t grasp it. His swollen wrist was numb and bound, and his fingers were broken. The officer placed the pen carefully between his fingers and it fell out again. The soldiers laughed. Although they couldn’t have said why, this seemed very funny. The officer had to hold his hand, with the pen in it, so that he could sign. They performed the maneuver together, painstakingly. When they had finished, the officer sat down across from him, without releasing the hand. He held it lightly, with a regard for its injuries. “Thank you,” the officer said. He nodded gratefully. He was so glad to have done it at last. His hopes kindled. He was being spoken to. The officer watched him with interest and he watched back, enraptured, his breathing quick from his exertion. Then the officer asked, “Where are the caves on Cheju?” He was returned to his cell.
After this there was very little left of him. He mimicked his torturers, making himself deaf to his body’s cries for help. His knowledge of his body propagated in chains, telephone lines, bridges between a limb and his love for it, coursing braids of communication wire. He sliced through lines and wires, exploded bridges, excised his mouth and his groin, amputated his limbs. He no longer knew when he urinated. Cast outside the boundary of itself, his body had ceased to obey any boundary between itself and the world. He was always damp and acrid with urine, trickling out of him the way blood trickled out of his various wounds. His terror at the mangling of his fingers had evaporated, and the memory of that terror was as unrecognizable as any of his other possessions. He watched his hand being mangled from a great distance. He had already sawed it off. He had thrown away his body as if it were ballast, not to speed his death, but to survive. It was his body that would kill him.
He stopped keeping track of the days, and his torturers grew tired of him. Truckloads of captured guerrillas and other prisoners of war from all across the peninsula were arriving at the school, naked from the waist up, roped together at the ankles. They filled the school yard, squatting on their stringy haunches in the cold, falling asleep on top of each other. They were too unwieldy with their arms bound behind them, unable to pick themselves up when they fell over, and bringing the whole column down, and so they were allowed to keep their hands and arms, holding them clasped against their chests as if in prayer. Their shaved heads and bare shoulders shingled together like the scales of a single, ailing creature. In the classroom he was made to stand on a wooden chair that was set on top of a desk, beneath the pipe, with his hands cuffed behind him. The cuffs were attached to the pipe with a short length of chain; he had to double over as his arms were pulled up. He dropped his head and swayed dangerously on the chair, his toes grabbing ineffectually. He was left alone.
He fell, finally, tumbling off the chair, and dislocating both his shoulders as the chain snapped taut. Then he hung, his toes brushing the desk, swaying slightly. This was how the officer found him. The upset chair lay on the floor. The baseball bat leaned in the corner. The officer cut him down and stretched him on the desk, knees bent, arms stuck out behind him. “Can you tell me anything?” the officer asked.
He was desperate to be useful. He didn’t want to disappoint. He didn’t want to be discarded. “I went to church,” he whispered. His voice crawled out of him.
“Where? What church did you go to?”
“Moon,” he rasped. He saw the bright moon. He remembered the way from the cave’s natural mouth to the village where he had been captured more clearly than the way from the mission to the tunnel, but even this memory was flattened and distorted, like the globe of the world unpeeled and forced onto a map. Ravines were very deep and particular landmark trees very large, but he could no longer assess the distance between any two points on his route. He struggled to feel the short trip again, but he needed his body around him. “Moon,” he repeated. To betray the world he’d stopped believing in it. He no longer saw it clearly to describe it. Something in him kept dragging that memory to safety and he could not save himself.
The officer sighed. “Where are the guerrillas on Cheju,” he said. His voice did not inflect this as a question. He intoned it, soothingly. “Give me a name.”
Chuck reached and only felt a void, the silty, lightless bottom of an ocean. Within it he brushed against things that darted from him in the instant that he sensed them. He was sweating profusely, a cold, coursing sweat he was not aware of. The officer wondered if he was in shock. “Todaro,” Chuck said suddenly. He remembered that man’s gentle hands on his head, shaving the lice from his scalp, and the intense relief of his skin coming clean.
The doctor was brought to him and he was untied. He could not raise himself up. The doctor lifted him into a sitting position and then embraced him, wrenching the shoulders back into their sockets with the tightness of his clasp. He collapsed in the doctor’s arms and did not move until the doctor pushed him away. “Hold yourself,” the doctor said. “Like this.” The doctor took hold of his arms for him and folded them across his chest, and closed his fingers around his elbows, so that the weight of his arms did not hang from the joints. “Can you?” the doctor asked. He nodded mutely, cradling himself. He began to cry. “Yes,” he said, in the high, thin hiccup of a child. He held himself. The doctor walked him outside and the cold spray of wind struck him, carrying its atoms of the sea. He saw the prisoners squatting, their faces downturned.
Later he would realize that they had been there for days, but at that moment they seemed to have materialized as a result of his confession. Their posture remained frozen but their eyes rotated swiftly and found him. His heart accelerated, hammering so hard his ribs bounced as they tried to contain it. He was following the wall of the yard, the steady pressure of the doctor’s arm across his back. His feet spun forward, paddling the ground. Gulls burst out of the storm clouds. Even in that twilight, his vision was stunned. The prisoners’ gaze rippled after him, the perfect repetition of heads with their close fur of stubble, the large, delicate ears, the quick shift again and again of the eyes. Then he saw him. A pair of outsize eyes met his, stared. He stumbled hard and the doctor shoved him forward. The other face passed out of sight. He twisted and tried to look back but there was only the ocean of bowed heads, bare napes, humped shoulders, rolling away. The doctor walked him through the gate and steered him out into the street. He sank down where he was but the doctor prodded him. “Not here. Go away. Disappear.”