APARTMENT 1G

Nami Mun

THE OLD NURSE hovered above him, sniffing at the fresh wound at the top of his head, picking at it with her fingernails until he could feel the wet lesion writhing like an oyster. The nurse’s two front teeth were black and smelled of infection. Confirm your name for me, she said. First name? Last name? And what part of your body are we working on today? When he twitched with pain, she giggled, every note sounding like tiny, dry brakes. Hanju Lee wanted sleep. The kind that turned the world into a dark, muddy slime. But the old nurse’s lips, peppered with prickly hair, scratched against his earlobe as she whispered a list of his failures into him—the Laundromat that had kept his wife washing other people’s underwear twelve hours a day; the motel that lost money the second they took it over; past due rents, past due gas bills, past due water bills, electric bills, supply bills, medical bills, and Songmi’s college tuition, so on and so on, and of course the little girl—the one with the birthmark shaped like a whale—found only blocks away from their motel, her tiny body bloated by the morning dew. And then the Russian. The supposed answer to all of their problems. The answer that took a square piece of his scalp as collateral.

The old nurse was now shoving something cold and metallic down his throat, making him scream. A furious white light screamed back, straight into his eyes. Lee squinted and hand-blocked the glare as the nurse chanted Count backward from a hundred as if on a loop, her head ballooning to the size of the sun and then shriveling back down, just as quickly, to a hard dried lemon. Count backward from a hundred, because honor can’t be bought and yet one pays highly, she said, wiggling her finger in admonishment. Soon, Lee fell headfirst into that slime, into a warm molasses where nothing lived, except maybe a burp of dialogue overheard in the orphanage where he grew up—No one will take him with that scar on his face—and then a sliver of thought about one of the monks who smelled of burned sugar, the sweet bitterness spiraling him down to a cup of coffee, his wife stirring it slowly, hypnotically, the spoon clinking against porcelain sounding robotic and medical, like the cold gray room where Songmi was born—how breakable she seemed, how his hands felt so dirty holding her.

Then came the thread of a long silky dream: bells ringing, a flash of bright orange. The air rippling with the smell of diesel. People bustling by, their heads whipping toward a monk who has lit himself on fire.

The monk is wearing an orange robe and sitting like Buddha in the middle of a busy street. High winds. High heat. Other monks encircle, ringing their bells. The hems of their orange robes flap like flags. Che yong, che yong, che yong, they chant. The flame waves wildly and black smoke rises. Everything is chaos. People are sobbing. Some scream. Some cover their ears, while others run for help.

The only one not moving is the monk in flames.

He is stone still. A gust of wind blows the flame to the right, and for a moment Lee can see the man’s unflinching face. The brows quickly vanish. The lids disintegrate and melt down his cheeks. Then he is simply eyes. Nose and lips meld into a lump on the chin, and the skin on his neck bubbles, then pops, the sound loud enough to make people wince. His shaved head blackens, then drips like grease. The skull is revealed. His bones fuse, and soon everything smells like hot sand.

In the end his entire cross-legged frame tips over like cheap furniture. Only then do fellow monks put out the fire. The casket arrives but the monks cannot fit his scorched body into it. His bones do not bend. So, upon their shoulders the casket flows down the street, a charred knee sticking out from under the lid. Black flakes of flesh sprinkle the air.

Lee couldn’t breathe. The scent of bones bit his nose. Che yong, che yong, che yong, for the roots and the branches make up the tree. Che yong, the nurse said, hovered over his face again, and as she spoke, her rotting teeth, all of them covered in fuzzy mold, fell from her mouth and plopped into his.

He clamped his lips shut and jerked side to side but one nurse morphed into three, and their six hands and arms whipped like tails and conspired to pin him down, pinch his nose, vise-grip his jaws open. Each nurse took turns looming over his mouth and let their teeth pebble down his throat, one by one, choking him, until his eyes foamed, until his hands fisted. And all he could do was moan for his daughter, over and over, like a long, foggy siren.

Songmi.

Lee’s eyes snapped open. You ready to tell us what happened? The ceiling fan above him wobbled and whined. Who did this to you? The light flickered. The room still smelled of gasoline, and maybe fish. Who scalped you like this? Bedsheets stuck to his back. The mattress was a pond. Just above his forehead the bandage sat heavy. A cold wet sock. In three blinks he saw he was no longer at the hospital but in his own apartment. Two more blinks and his wife slept soundly to his left, snoring, even. Only the guilty can sleep so well, he thought.

He lit up a cigarette so as to breathe and tracked the smoke up to the flickering bulb. At the age of fifty-one, Lee still slept with the light on, something his wife had found charming at first. What do you think you’re afraid of? she had asked once, as if it were that simple.

When the phone rang, it startled him. He was about to answer but his wife placed a cold hand on his shoulder.

“What if it’s Songmi?”

“Then we really mustn’t answer,” she said, and rolled to her side.

After six rings the answering machine clicked. “Yeah, this is Joe McGill from the New York . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence, seemed distracted. “Anyway, I’m sure you’re getting a lot of calls but if you have anything you wanna get off your chest, anything about the little girl, I’d make sure to do right by you.”

The reporter went on but Lee stopped listening.

“How long have you been awake?” his wife asked, still with her back to him.

“Does it matter?”

The ceiling fan took up the silence. “You’re not the only one suffering,” she said evenly, and then: “Go back to sleep.”

Lee got out of bed. He wanted to show he wasn’t that easy. But then he stood at the desk in his underwear and socks, not knowing what to do. And wasn’t this the problem. He never knew what to do. For him, the time between inaction and action could be measured only in oceans. Oceans of doubt. Wasn’t this why he was now staring at his suit, cleaned and pressed, hanging over the back of his chair? The pants dragged along the carpet, as if someone had hammered the knees and snapped the legs into a backward L. And next to the legs, the two cans of gasoline.

From his desk he picked up the picture of Songmi. A moment from her high school graduation. Her face a perfect diamond. Her smile soft, as if apologetic. The girl who grew up eating ramen and doing homework in the utility closet of their Laundromat was valedictorian. He was proud of her, not because of grades but because she’d remained humble. And kind. He tried to feel proud of himself—tried telling himself that he had made her, that he’d had a part in creating this goodness, but then he looked around and saw where he was—a one-room ground-floor studio apartment that contained one desk, one chair, one bed, two burners, and a coffee table where he and his wife ate rice porridge and kimchi nearly every night, and salted fish when lucky. There was no sofa, no dining table, no TV, no life, unless one counted the small family of mice squeaking under the kitchen sink.

No, it was impossible for the proud to live here.

“Don’t be frightened.” His wife had pulled back the covers, and through the sheer nightgown he could trace her long slender back as it dipped at the waist and rose at the hips to meet her red underwear. Even at rest, she was in control, which only made him want to revolt. He picked up the phone and dialed.

“Calling her will only make things worse.”

His hands trembled.

“She’ll think she had a chance to stop us but couldn’t.”

When the line rang on her end, his mouth dried. He could picture the pay phone just outside her dorm room, a triangle of light painting the hallway as Songmi opened her door and squinted at the ringing made conspicuous by the early hour. She’d be in her pajamas, the panda slippers he’d bought her, and she’d walk slowly to the phone because she was smart enough to know that at five in the morning it could only be bad news. Only bad news ever had the right.

On the twelfth ring she answered. “Hello?”

Lee opened his mouth. Nothing.

“Hello?” she whispered this time, sounding frightened.

Lee couldn’t believe how much he wanted to cry.

“Who is this?” she asked, and he wanted to answer her—to say the things a father was supposed to say to a daughter. Advice on boys and love and how to change a tire or how not to trust people who say “Trust me.” Most of all he wanted to apologize. He was a failure—not because of losses financial, but because he had viewed life through glass so stained and dense, not one ray of truth could shine in or out. He failed, in the end, in seeing truth—the truth in others but mostly the truth about himself. And now it was too late. Even if he were to break the glass, all that lived on either side were molds of neglect. He wanted to say all of these things but something like cold gravel clogged his throat. “Dad, is that you?” she asked, and, as if his hand had been struck, he hung up.

He stared at the phone.

“All you ever think about is yourself,” his wife said. Her eyes turned tight as bullets.

She understood nothing. All he had ever done was think of others. That was the problem. He thought too much about how others saw him. Including his daughter, who, after today, would see him as a liar or, worse, a coward. And especially his wife, whom he’d wanted to impress the moment he met her. All those years ago. So many miles ago. Just outside their window a bus shrieked to a stop and sighed, and a woman wearing a head scarf got on. It was early and the woman’s features got lost in the dirty light of morning, but Lee could tell by the crook of her back that she was a hard worker—someone who’d never be rewarded while she was alive.

“Instead of feeling sorry for ourselves, why don’t we just get dressed.” His wife was sitting up now, reaching for his pack of cigarettes.

Her dress lay on the coffee table. On top of that, a necklace. The previous night she announced that appropriate attire was important, adding, For many are called but few are chosen. Christian nonsense. For most of their twenty-five-year marriage she went to church and recited verses as though she had written them herself, but Lee knew all along that to her, church was just a vessel for networking. Every Sunday she sat in the front pews, her face shining with piety, and every Sunday afternoon she tried to shake hands with the right people, hoping that someone would introduce her to a smart investment, a quick moneymaker, anything that could catapult her into one of those immigrant success stories she’d read in Korea Daily. That was how they’d gotten involved with the motel. And now Lee understood why the money, at first, came so easily.

He picked up the necklace and held the tiny cross in the center of his palm.

“We’re doing the right thing,” she said and took a long drag.

“I wasn’t disagreeing.”

“But I can feel you turning weak. I always can.”

“I’m not as weak as you think I am,” he said, feeling bold.

“Well, I’m not as strong as you think I am so perhaps today, just this once, you can be a man.”

Without much thought he flung the necklace at her. “I am your husband and you will not talk to me that way.”

The necklace had missed her. She laughed, her mouth slacking wide enough to show the gaps in her upper row of teeth. “We’re not in Korea anymore, my dear. It’s much too late for you to have the upper hand.”

He wanted to hit her. He wanted to stomp her face and break that smile.

“And if you think beating me will finally turn you into a man, you have my blessing.” She slid out of bed, picked the necklace up off the floor, and coiled it around her wrist as she walked up to him, stood close enough for him to smell her breath. She was tall for a Korean woman. Slender and taut. A human knife. “But there are other ways to prove your manhood.” Her hands swirled against his chest and then coaxed the sides of his arms, chilling the nerves along his spine. “You have to trust me and know that we are doing right.”

“How can you be certain?”

“Because . . .” Pulling him in gently she spoke into his ear. “It’s easy to be certain when you don’t have options.” She tilted his chin and kissed him lightly on the lips, twice, before walking him back to the bed and sitting him down so she could examine the top of his head. She fingered the outer edges of the bandage and peeled up a corner, gently, and blew into the wound.

“Does it hurt?”

He lied and said no.

Her hands smoothed the stubble on his face. “Soon, nothing will ever hurt you,” she whispered, her eyes closed in prayer. “The path has already been built, not by God but by us. Now we must simply walk down it.”

“We can tell the police how little we were involved.” He squeezed her hands, wanting her to open her eyes, but she kept them closed.

“Our duty in life is to die with a little more honor than we were born with.”

“We didn’t know what they were doing. With the girls,” he said.

Her face opened and looked at his, searching for something, a flicker of understanding. But he didn’t understand, never could. On the coffee table her dress waited. She touched the fabric, the bright white a contrast to the room’s sickly gray. “No one will believe us. We’re immigrants. We’re nobodies.”

“Maybe the journalist can help. Jimmy Park can translate for us. He wants to help. I don’t know why but he keeps offering.”

“Jimmy’s a useless man. And he keeps offering help precisely because he knows he’s useless.”

For months Lee had wondered if she and Jimmy had been having an affair. Now he was certain. And certain it had not gone well. Her affairs never surprised him. The fact that she found time to have one was what confounded him most.

“He’s a good man,” he added, wanting to see her reaction.

“I’d rather have a useful one than a good one. Why do you think his wife tried to kill herself?”

Lee slid off the bed and sank to the floor. “When did you get this cruel?”

“When?” Using the window as a mirror, she put on her necklace. “The real question should be how, my dear husband.”

“You weren’t always this way.”

“Whereas you have always been this way,” she said too quickly.

“And what way is that?”

“Someone who makes me this way.” She went to the desk and began straightening it, pushing the mound of bills into the trash can with dramatic indifference, repositioning the phone, putting away a roll of stamps inside a drawer. “You would’ve kept us washing dirty underwear for the rest of our lives. You would’ve let Songmi grow up to also be a nobody. What have you done to get us out of this apartment? Nothing. And what have you done to accept that you knew exactly what the girls were for?”

“I knew nothing.”

His wife got on her knees and took his face in her hands. “Listen to me, Hanju. I’m begging you. We must admit to what we did. We must know we did wrong. One has many good reasons in lying to others but there is no use in lying to oneself. Not at this point. Do you understand?”

He looked up, at her eyes, that efficient mouth of hers. “But you were the one who shook hands with the Russian. And you were the one who wanted the motel.”

She let go of him.

“Oh God,” he heard himself say. He stood up and backed away from her. “You knew.”

The silver cross winked from the base of her neck. “It must feel good to blame others.”

“You knew it all along.”

“We were in debt.”

He walked to the desk, grabbed the chair for support.

“Somebody had to do something,” she said.

“But nobody asked you to.”

“You’re absolutely right. You never have to ask for anything. I just take care of things, don’t I? I do all of the dirty work so you can go on believing you’re a good man. Well, being good in America is a luxury. A luxury I never got to have.”

She took off her nightgown and began getting dressed. She hadn’t changed much since they’d first met. Skin as white as paper. Jet-black hair tapering at the middle of her back, pointing to the rest of her. Her beauty only confused him. She was far more beautiful, even at this age, than any of the girls the Russian had brought over—from Vietnam, Laos, Korea, from wherever, to be hostesses. That’s what they were supposed to be. In retrospect, the idea of hiring girls from other countries to be restaurant hostesses sounded absurd. And now the truth reverberated through him, endlessly, like the bells that kept on ringing long after the monks at the orphanage had left the courtyard. Only then did he remember his dream. Then the little girl, the one they found in the empty lot, just down the road from the motel. Why did she have to be Korean? Why did she have to be so young? Just barely twelve years old. Legs bent unnaturally. Blood smeared across her face, as though someone had tried to wipe it. He wanted to vomit. He shut the image out because none of it mattered now. None of them mattered. He finally understood. He had to sit down.

“Put on your suit,” his wife said. She was dressed now. White dress, tight at the waist, with a pair of white stockings, white shoes. Funeral colors.

“You’re the one,” he said, barely able to get the words out.

She put on earrings.

“You took the girl’s body out to the lot, didn’t you?”

His wife walked up to him and turned. “Help me with the zipper.”

He couldn’t move.

“Help me,” she said again, this time taking his hands and putting them to work.

When he finished, all she said was, “I’m not a monster,” in a voice he had never heard before. Now look who is lying to oneself, he wanted to say but didn’t because she was crying. He couldn’t see her face but her shoulders shook. She cried often but this time felt different. This time, he could tell, she actually believed she was a monster—and her denial had simply been a wish for the truth to be untrue.

“How could you do it?” he asked, knowing that even this didn’t matter. Today wasn’t about truth or lies or blame or monsters or money. Today was about the end, and the beginning—that day in Seoul when she walked through the doors at the watch repair shop where he worked as a clerk. Today was about the silk blouse she had on. Her cream-colored shoes. Her eyes as bright as apples.

When she came into the shop all Lee had wanted was to wake up every morning to that face. To be graced by those hands. He straightened his posture so as to seem taller, counted money at the register as though his family owned the place, as though he had family, and tried not to think of himself as the thug that he was, the high school dropout that he was, the part-time employee that he was, getting paid under the table, mostly in cash but sometimes in unclaimed watches, which he sold in the black market. In two years I’ll have my own business, he remembered saying as she was leaving.

She paused at the door. Hope the watch will be ready before then.

Friday, he told her.

She nodded and made to leave again.

At five, he said, stepping out from behind the counter. Then we’ll go out to dinner afterward.

She turned and smiled that smile of hers. Tiny fishhooks in his heart. What else will I be doing? You seem to know my schedule.

On Saturday you’ll be at the beach. I’m done at noon.

I can’t swim, she said.

Neither can I, he said.

Two years after that he didn’t have his own business but he proposed anyway, only to have her family object. Her father threatened to disown, and then disowned. And as if her parents’ actions had lit a fuse in her, she left everything behind—her name, her inheritance, her country, her seat at Seoul University where she would have studied medicine, her silk blouses, her chauffeur, her cook, her maid—to accompany Lee to the States. First to Oklahoma; then to Daly City, California; then to the Bronx, to end up working at a Laundromat, washing clothes at fifteen cents per pound. All those years, Lee wondered why she never left him. Only now, as he held her in his arms, did he understand that maybe her loyalty was nothing more than unwavering spite.

He watched her now, her hands covering her face, and he imagined those very hands dragging the girl’s body into the empty lot in the middle of the night. He imagined his wife trying not to look at the girl’s face, a face that, even in the dark, would’ve reminded her of a younger Songmi. How could she do it, he asked himself, but then the answer hit him almost immediately. She had done it, as she had done everything, because she knew he couldn’t.

She held out his shirt. Lee took it, got dressed, each layer of clothing helping him stand straight. A kind of armor that arrives only after one accepts all of one’s actions in life. And in Lee’s case, his inactions. Today, this moment, was not about truth or lies. It was only about whether one wanted to die with or without love. “You’re not a monster,” he finally said.

She wiped her tears and then fixed his tie, the knot hitting his Adam’s apple.

“There,” she said and stepped back for a look.

Minutes from now, Lee will focus on his wife, his beautiful monster wife. “You be the strong one,” she’ll say, and he’ll guide her to the bed, straighten the folds of her dress as she lies on her side. First he’ll pour the gasoline on his half of the mattress, then around her, outlining her shape, before letting the clear solvent splash her legs, her trembling chest. The bright white dress will sag to a brown, and his wife will whimper like a child lost in the woods. The fumes will bend the air. Everything will turn to a sheet of glassine. He’ll sit on the bed and pour the entirety of the second can onto his head and shoulders, the gasoline showering the back of his neck at once cold and burning.

He’ll grab the lighter. His wife will tug on his elbow and try to pull him down beside her. She’ll cry Please between tears and Lee will hold the lighter inches from his chest and understand that he has never loved his wife more than in this moment.

Minutes after that, their studio apartment will be the brightest it has ever been. The mattress Lee and his wife have slept on for nearly a quarter of a century will go up in flames, the fire tickling the ceiling fan before melting the blades into taffy. People in the apartment above and adjacent will wake up to the smell of smoke. They’ll grab their photo frames, their immigration papers, their soda cans of cash, their cigarettes, their check-cashing cards, social security cards, bus cards, green cards, parole cards, their plastic rosaries, their food stamps, their eye-rubbing children. Sirens will wail. Firemen will sweat. The sun will rise but the sky will darken just above their building, and coughing tenants will be ushered across the street and they’ll stand there, in their bathrobes and socks, trying to figure out who the hell lived in apartment 1G.