When he was brave enough he prayed, more often than he liked to admit, although he hesitated at calling these prayers. They were motivated not by certainty, by belief in a power, but by total, irresolvable uncertainty. He prayed to Kim. And it was only conversation. Was that you? he asked. You were there, facing death. And you looked up. And saw me.
He wondered what had shaped him more, his guilt toward Kim, or the chance it was mistaken. And he wondered what he feared more: to be guilty, or to know that if that face had not been Kim’s, he would feel absolved. Perhaps he didn’t want to be certain. Still, he returned and returned to that moment, frustrated each time by his inability to lengthen his glimpse, or to sharpen its focus. But he felt what he’d felt no less powerfully: a shock of recognition that bound him to someone he might not have known. He had longed so much to feel something, even loss. The feeling might have been misplaced.
And so he didn’t know if this was Kim, or even if, by confessing, he’d saved himself. After the cease-fire Dr. Su, the former Minister for Social Affairs in the republic’s prewar government, encountered Chuck’s father, Dr. Ahn, in Seoul, on the lawn of Yonsei University. Both men had returned to teaching. Dr. Ahn was reinvigorated by his gigantic lectures, the swollen student population being one effect of American funding for the reconstruction effort. The Doctor regarded these raw, overage, unruly students with excitement, poorly masked by contempt. They had no patience, no work ethic, no appreciation for the nonpragmatic arts. They wanted money. Glittering buildings would soon climb from the foundations at that moment being poured. The noise of construction shook every street. The two men stood talking for a long time, comparing notes on the university’s administration, catching up.
At last, Su brought himself to mention a particular incident during the war. Early in 1951, after the government evacuated to Pusan for the second time, he was contacted by an official of ROKA’s intelligence office who asked him if he knew a professor named Ahn, with a son. Ahn’s brother was supposed to be Congressman Lee. Su had said yes. He’d given a description of Chang, doing the best that he could, not having seen the boy for almost three years. Slight, well-spoken, fairly fluent in English. He was not enlisted as a soldier. Su understood he worked as an army translator. “Why?” Su had asked the official. “Do you know where he is?” At this point the official had seemed eager to get off the phone. No, no, he had said. Intelligence had picked up a boy, a no-name, with amnesia, but his claim to be Dr. Ahn’s son must be false, because he was very poorly educated, and did not speak any English at all. “That would be the tip-off,” Su said. Su recalled Chang’s English as having been very good. It did not occur to Su until much later that the story made no sense. How would an amnesiac remember his father, and uncle?
At the time, Su had offered to come and take a look at the person in question. His offer was refused. “It is not the same boy,” the official said firmly. The exchange had disturbed Su, but it soon left his mind. One of Su’s own sons was dead.
“How is Chang?” Su asked the Doctor hesitatingly.
The Doctor nodded, reassuring him. “Alive,” he said.
The cease-fire was made in the late summer of 1953. The following spring he returned with his parents to Seoul. Their house was still there, derelict. They closed most of its rooms: the attic, where the Doctor had been interrupted in his attempt to take his life by never taking action again; Miki’s room, the libraries, the third and second floors. The staircase was sealed. Squirrels filled those upper rooms, their frenetic activity making a sound like balls rolling. Doves and pigeons roosted in the eaves, and their ardent moans filtered down through the house. He loosened the panel of the staircase chamber, and placed his hand in the hot, dark space. He did not think to walk around the grounds. He might have deliberately forgotten. He was busy with his letter-writing campaign, which his father alternately ridiculed and grieved. His father did not want to believe he would really leave the country when his opportunity, and his duty, were both here. “Harvard, maybe,” his father said. “Certainly. That would be an honor.” But Chuck meant to go anywhere. His whole purpose, beyond getting to the U.S., was to leave South Korea. He sent the letter to every address he obtained, recopying it endlessly in his precise, blocky print, only changing the university’s name. You will not regret supporting me.
He could never have said he trusted fate in that blithe, blind way which sees fate as a simple instrument to bring about well-being, but he acknowledged its absolute power, and this meant he trusted the announcements it made. He took to doing his reading on the high terrace of his family’s home, so that he could watch for the mailman’s approach through the tops of the trees. The warmth of the summer was beginning to make itself felt. He would hear the chirring of insects, and feel the still-cool breeze. The trees would sway together like boats at their moorings. Around three the miniature figure appeared at the base of the hill, just the top of his head and the bulge of his bag, passing out of sight and returning, slightly larger each time, until he had come through the street gate, left ajar now that there was no servant to answer the bell. And after two months during which Chuck waited with no expectations, no real hope that he would ever get an answer, the mailman came trudging through the gate clutching an unusually large envelope. Chuck threw his book to the ground and went running down the path. He wasn’t sure how he’d known this was it. The letter held an offer, of full financial support, including airfare, from the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennesse. He hadn’t known where Tennessee was. When he found it on the map, he was frightened. It was so far from the ocean. He’d sent out seventy-four letters in all.
And then he did walk around the grounds, which were waist-high with weeds, rutted from trucks that had driven across them, dotted with islands of wildflowers he’d never seen there before. Little saplings had grown up, and waved like switches. The old tree was still there, a time traveler, in a landscape that was strangely transformed. When he entered the shelter made by its branches he immediately saw the pair of shoes, their laces tied together, slung over a branch eight or ten feet off the ground. He could never have missed them, the night he sat for hours beneath this tree, after the war began, waiting for Kim to appear. They had been hung there since then; they turned slightly, as if still reverberating from the hands that had positioned them. He climbed up, reaching with one arm, and knocked them down: fine, European-made shoes, wing tips, real nails. They were badly scuffed, a hole worn in each sole, the leather faded, dull, and stiff as wood from the rain, but overall they had stood up very well through the war. He could see the way a second pair of feet had worn them down differently, the way Kim’s gait told itself, laid over his own. He held them against his chest. They smelled clean, of the outdoors and the elements. He would never know how they had come to be here, but he knew that they were meant to say good-bye. If Kim was alive, he would never return. He remembered Kim saying, “Do you know what I think makes a great man? It’s not what he does, but whether or not he has passion, the kind we have now, when he’s old. And I will. I shall.” He imagined that Kim had left Cheju long before he arrived, to rejoin the fighting. He would have traveled with the current of the Communist retreat, back through Seoul, stopping here before he went across the parallel. In the years to come he would think of Kim in the North, in what was now the other country.
He himself never saw the North again, or his family’s country estate, for as long as he lived. The estate could not possibly exist anymore. But that memory, of that place, was sealed like a globe within him. The trees, and the rise of the land as you walked toward the shrine, the precise moment at which the twinge in your calves announced that you would be renewed, that the strain of the climb would rush your blood through you, now, that perspiration would begin to dew out on your skin, and the breath in your lungs grow hot and regular, as the line of trees slowly rose over the crest and became visible. A boulder sat halfway up the hill and was a perfect place to look back from, over the valley, at the wide flashing river, but you never rested on the way up, you did not want to stop. All of that was within him, the feel of his body when he walked there was within him, in the way that the other memory was not; that was a full place, it expanded him, where the other thing diminished him. It obliterated itself and took part of him with it, like the injured tissue surrounding a wound, fusing together where it shouldn’t, and shrinking the body. He could not remember the pain he had felt, as if all that had happened to him had been enacted on another. Although he had witnessed every detail, the pain was as distant from him as the distance between two bodies; the other may be there, in your arms, their length matched against yours, but whatever they feel is darkness. It could be another universe, it could not exist at all. He could not imagine what the other body felt, and so he became another to himself; and after this happened, how could he be close to someone, when he was two people?
But one morning, in the Charles Hotel in New Orleans, he bathed, dressed in his suit, and drove with Katherine to her home. He rose up the stairs, through the languor of those rooms and the scent from the garden. This was the house she had lived in. As a child she’d split her head on this banister; the small scar, just a tiny movement of skin, like a whitecap far out on the ocean, lay almost hidden in her eyebrow. He had touched it and touched it. He followed her into her mother’s room and Glee looked up and smiled; a beautiful woman, the fine armature of her bones too evident beneath her skin. “Is this your friend?” Glee asked. “Yes,” Katherine said, and he moved forward shyly. Glee studied him. The light in her eyes was like Katherine’s. Metallic or warm, sometimes lethal. But there. Always there. She lay taking her time, taking it all in, this very thin, brown, tentative young man sweating in a shiny black suit. He did not do what an American young man of his age would have done—stand too close to her with a familiar, overconfident air, and pretend she wasn’t sick, and joke around to hide his nervousness. This young man didn’t do that. At last she said, “I never in my life imagined I’d find myself in such a situation. Did you?”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
It was a hot day, humid and blue, but outside the city the air was cool as it coursed over them, and through it they could feel the plain warmth of the sun and not be oppressed by it. The car’s shadow was stark and detailed. When they looked at it riding alongside them they saw their elongated figures stretching out of the top, Glee’s great straw hat flopping like a bloom in the wind, Katherine’s gossamer scarf, almost translucent to look at but thrown down on the ground in black outline and streaming behind, and between them, his unadorned head. They drove through wild, rich, flat country, with only the foliage of trees, like dark cumulus clouds, and the telephone poles rising up from it. The furrows of unplanted fields spun past, red with clay or the color of coffee, and the car’s shadow bumped wildly over them. He was perched in the high space behind the front seats, with the car’s collapsed top to lean back against. He would have to hunch to feel the shelter of the windscreen, but he didn’t. He let the air roar against him. Glee sat with her eyes closed and her cheek turned against the seat, resting. Katherine reached back, and he caught the hand and held it. He could feel the water coming. The earth changed so subtly beneath them that, although they watched carefully for it, they missed the threshold where the water started conquering the land. They only knew when they had passed it. Marsh grass rippled away from the road. The sky’s color was diluted with light and it seemed to recede even further above them. They turned onto a narrow track, white from crushed shells, and the ground broke apart, water standing low in the grass, the road rising to run like a dike, and then a channel taking shape to one side, deepening, and showing current on its surface. Beyond them was the pale brown line of the Gulf, where the channel was bound. And then they glimpsed the small house, floating in the air, and as they grew nearer saw its legs, one pair on land and one pair in the water, and the porch that jutted over the channel, with wooden steps descending to a short, sturdy dock. The water was still high from the storm, and it kicked lazily through the dock’s slats. Nothing else about the house seemed affected. It stood serenely, bleached silver and tinged green with mildew, from years in the sun and the wet. Katherine turned off the engine and they sat in the vast quiet of the bright day, feeling the heat settle onto them again, and listening to Glee’s reedy breath. At last Katherine touched her. “We’re here, Mommy.”
They went into the house together, carrying Glee between them like an armload of tinder, so light, and so brittle. When they were inside they encountered a sweet mushroom smell. Mold bloomed delicately on the couch cushions, but the cushions were oilcloth, made for an outdoor life, and they dusted them off with their palms. When they pressed their faces to the stripped beds they smelled nothing worse than skin. A bare bulb hung down over a rough wooden table that stank faintly, eternally, of crab. An old murder mystery paperback of her father’s sat on the window ledge, yellow and swollen with water. They found one of the deck chairs, its faded canvas still secured to the frame with gray cord run through grommets, and pulled it onto the deck. Chuck threw himself down heavily, and the old gray cord held. Then they lowered Glee into it. She lay squinting out over the waterway, at the shifting grass, and the brown stripe of Gulf, and the sky. “Well, Kitty,” she said. “Do you think we can do it?”
“There’s a grocery twenty miles back. Your doctor won’t come out here, though.”
“That is the idea.” Glee closed her eyes and smiled.
“I think we can. If it is what you truly want.”
“It is.”
“And no complaining about heat and damp and bugs.”
“You forget how much time I’ve spent here. I used to get in that water wearing your father’s old sneakers and a pair of his old saggy pants I cut short.”
“What on earth were you doing?”
“I was catching our supper. Your father had a horrible broken-down outboard that he went off in every day, and if this water wasn’t four feet deep all the way to Mexico I would have been a widow that much sooner. But he never caught anything. He just liked to get out in that boat and then he fell asleep. Do you believe I could catch a fish with a net, Mr. Ahn?”
“I do,” he said, imagining her standing stock-still with the net held out, severely patient. Her image would be doubled by the water. “Like a bird.”
“That’s right,” she said, pleased. “Will you wait for her?” she wondered suddenly, as Katherine said, “Don’t,” and batted her arm. Glee ignored this. “Will you wait for Kitty, while she’s here with me? Are you that kind of young man?”
“Yes,” he said. Glee returned his gaze, interested. They studied each other.
“It won’t be long,” she said at last, without sadness.
When Katherine called Charles she said simply, “I’m staying here, until it’s over. And I’ve thought about things.”
“What things?” he asked, unnecessarily. He knew. Bower had telephoned him, remembering his early kindnesses to Chuck. Bower thought Addison might have some idea of where Chuck had gone. The manager of the bindery had called Bower claiming Chuck had robbed her of a one-hundred-dollar bill, and of some imprecise sum of money which she surmised he had taken on the basis of his snapping at her bait. That Chuck had absconded from the job without leaving a trace corroborated what would have otherwise been a preposterous accusation. Bower spoke with awkward extravagance. He was mortified and sad. He didn’t want to believe this was so. The worst of it was that the boy had gotten such an easy ride. He’d had everything handed to him. Perhaps this was what to expect.
“He’s with you, isn’t he?” Addison said. And something in her answer, the hesitant, guttural tone of her voice when she said, after a moment, only “Yes,” struck him so finally, with such actual love for her, that he hung up the telephone that instant, not out of anger, but because that rough sound in her voice was the thing that he wanted to keep. He found himself walking to her house. He hesitated a long moment before he let himself in. It was half packed, suspended in the midst of its disturbance, like the ruins of Pompeii. A cup sitting too close to the edge of the table, awaiting its saucer. An open box of awful children’s gifts that had been given, over decades, to her mother. He sat among these things, with a lump in his throat, amazed that she had gotten this far in her belief that she could stay with him. Then he called Bower, and persuaded him to dignify Sewanee not with vengeance, but justice and mercy. “We’ve all done things, George. The mistakes of young men. We’ve all made them.”
“I suppose we have,” Bower said. It cheered him to be placed in the youthful category, even if retrospectively.
In the end, Bower expelled Chuck, with this offer: a job in the dining hall kitchen for the duration of the summer, to pay off the theft and the bindery’s cost in replacing him. He would have to relinquish his room in Strake House. If he fulfilled his debts, he would be permitted to apply for readmission. And if admitted, in the future he would work. His scholarship he gave up forever. “I accept it,” Chuck said, and Bower cried out, “Splendid! My boy, I’m relieved.”
“I am,” he swallowed hard. “I am very, very glad. Yes, I am.”
Bower heard the slight quaver and hastened to get them past this awkward moment. “We’ve all done things,” Bower said kindly.
She drove him to the bus station and they stood there again, in that provisional place. They searched each other for small details they might have missed. But he already knew how to see her. On the porch of the coast house with Glee, as if they rode at the front of a ship, their gaze fixed on the same point ahead. The house had so few rooms, was so bare, yet held so many things. The tin lid of Glee’s cigarette filters, each one stained by lipstick. The cheap transistor radio, through which music only drifted, as if in transit between galaxies. Glee would lift a finger in the air, and grow perfectly still, always hoping to hear the whole song. The sheets from the beds folded up into squares. The dishes, the sun hats, the fish net. He will see her, gathering what’s left into a box. Not yet, but soon. Pressing the windows shut, and leaving last night’s new mold undisturbed. Rinsing her glass, setting it in the box, standing in the open door holding the box tightly, taking a last look around. Then she pulls the door to.
And she sees him, back in Sewanee. Walking with his head down and a letter of hers in his hands. Reading her prophecy. This is what I imagine. She knows his landscape so well, better than he’ll ever know it. She can tell him where the shadow lies on the quad lawn, when he steps into it; how the colors around him emerge, as his gaze readjusts; when the branch will brush him, as he ducks beneath the tree. There he stops. Her presence accompanies him everywhere, gliding at his shoulder, needing nothing to make itself felt, but sometimes, even so, she lays a hand on him. He waits, leans against it a moment. He had thought he would always have two things, the great space within him where his home had to live, and that diminishment, when his body had imploded. Between the two, the excess of memory and its absence, was left a story he couldn’t describe. But the story had begun to circumvent these difficulties. It grew shorter, and simpler. It would close around that event as his memory had closed around the torture and his body around the wound, and, constricting, leave no absence behind. She waits with him, patiently. It always takes such a strange summoning of himself, not reluctance, but the need to be poised, every thread of him knit. He breathes deeply, and whirls to face her. She sees him looking, through the tree’s shifting shade, across the empty quad. He hears the sound of a lawnmower. Senses five forty-five in the slant of the light. And then he folds the letter carefully, and slides it into his pocket, and feels it there beneath his hand as he walks back out, into the glare.
For the rest of that summer he worked in the kitchen with Louis, and the rest of Louis’s bachelor crew. There was a terrace that hung off the back of the president’s house, a wide, shady surface overlooking the lawn, and beyond that, the mossy and delicate woods falling toward a ravine. The summer people came here, for cocktails at six, and barbecue. He became a barbecuer, garbed in a stiff, full-length chef’s apron as he turned and basted meat, waved the smoke from his face, solemnly served off the grill. It was summertime, and 1956. There had been a great relaxation of protocol, but the atmosphere remained genteel, and forgiving. He saw Charles Addison sometimes, squiring the niece of a Sewanee dowager, or standing at the center of an outburst of laughter, or standing alone. Addison would nod to him, a single tilt of his head and a momentary fixity of his eyes, and he would bow in return. Dance music wafted off the phonograph. One of Sewanee’s many resident dogs trotted up to menace his grill, or a woman strode over the terrace and said, “I’ve been looking for you, Charles, here’s your drink,” and their connection was broken. He turned back to his work.
After dinner was over, the kitchen crew took what was left of the food, carrying their plates down the stone stairs that led to the lawn. They ate sitting there, gripping sweaty bottles of beer that the president set aside for them. They put off cleaning up for quite a while, lingering to smoke, gaze, exchange well-worn comments on the beauty of the day. The kind of talk that carried nothing but their feeling for each other, which was reflexive, and affirming. Yes, I’m here, it said. I see it, too. He got along well with these men. They never peered into his thoughtful silences, but they accepted him with humor, and their company sheltered him. He rode the bus with them, back to his small rented room in Monteagle, and even at the end of their workday, eight o’clock in the evening, the sun was still with them, guttering through the trees. He turns his face toward it. There are moments like this, rare instances of certainty and self-possession. When he found his family in Pusan his mother shooed him away from the door, because she thought he was a beggar. He had recoiled from her rebuke, gone down the street, and sat against a wall for hours before he went and knocked again. And yet he hadn’t been angry or frightened, but only relieved. His cowardice, his weakness and sickness, were all swept away. In his mother’s failure to recognize him, his duty to his family was done; and the suspicion that he had, despite shame and uncertainty, secretly harbored all along—that this could not be his life, that this war would never define him—finally proved to be right. And although his mother had wept that night, endlessly, and found food to give him, and washed his clothes, and sat clinging to his hands until he simply fell asleep in front of her, and although he went the next day to the USIS offices in Pusan and got a job, and spent the next two years, until the cease-fire, translating wire—consuming it, as if it could give him a new frame for thinking, a new lexicon—he was already gone, at that moment. He was already free.