“Who are you?” Abby gasped and rose to her feet.
“I’m Woo-jin Kan.”
“The championship dishwasher?”
“No, the writer.”
“Did you do this to me?”
“Did what?”
“Kill me?”
“No, no, I wanted to help you when you were dead but the cops wouldn’t let me.”
“I need to find Rocco.” Abby propelled herself one-shoed in a direction. The editing felt off. She’d blinked in the theater beside Kylee Asparagus, surrounded by Federicos, as her life played out in gross caricature onstage. So where was this? This field? The roaring of jet engines? Some smelly guy with fucked-up hair?
“I need a phone,” Abby said. “I need a shoe.”
The only place Woo-jin knew to find a phone and shoe was at the Ambassador’s house, so he pointed Abby along the narrow brick streets of Georgetown on a trajectory toward the Embassy.
“What happened to me?” Abby choked.
“You died three times,” Woo-jin said. “Or two and a half times. Dr. Farmer has your other bodies at the morgue.”
“I was watching a play. I’m confused.”
“That is correct.”
“I saw a ghost. There was a clone funeral. An orgy.”
Hoping to sound helpful, Woo-jin communicated elements of his last few days. “My sister got hauled away by a helicopter. The Ambassador gave me a shower. I got diamond-coated steel wool. I saw an old man in the desert with piles of books. Dr. Farmer asked me to suck his wiener.”
The two characters paused in the street and looked at one another. Their different brains arrived at precisely the same conclusion, which only Abby could articulate.
“Nothing makes sense,” she said. “A permutation of me is stuck in some sort of fucking zone.”
“The Embassy is close,” Woo-jin said.
Abby stumbled, clutching Woo-jin’s arm, which she continued to clutch even after she wasn’t stumbling. She was perplexed to find herself trusting this guy. They turned a corner in a part of the neighborhood undergoing a perverted, reverse urban puberty, where infant industrial buildings grew up into homes, and came to the Embassy. The most intense light they’d ever seen radiated from the windows and the seams around the door. The house appeared to bulge, barely able to contain whatever produced the light within. Shielding their eyes they proceeded up the front walk. Woo-jin rapped on the door. A moment later Pierre the imitation chauffeur answered, hat off, hair berserk, looking glazed and happy.
“Is the Ambassador in?” Woo-jin asked.
“Oh, he’s in all right,” Pierre said. “Is he ever! Whoa!”
“We’re looking for a shoe.”
“He’s really busy right now. I mean really busy,” Pierre said.
“I’m an official delegate,” Woo-jin said.
Pierre impatiently nodded for them to enter. The humble materials of the house—wood, varnish, latex paint, porcelain fixtures, metal hardware, sealants, and caulking still constituted the structure of a house but exuded an otherworldly wisdom, as though the elements from which they’d been formed contained memories of a purpose far more holy. Light emanated from every surface, causing the air to slightly ripple. A door knob could barely stand the awesome fact that it was (Oh my God, I’m a door knob!) and individual beams of wood in the floor trembled at the majesty of being. Woo-jin walked down the hall, pivoted when he came to a door, and waved for Abby to follow.
“The Ambassador is in here,” Woo-jin said.
Abby followed as she would in a dream, her senses propelling her to the doorway, through which she observed the elegantly appointed living room. On one upholstered chair sat a man with dreadlocks, colorful garments, and a scepter crafted from a toilet brush and plunger handle, beaming in the presence of three glowing orbs the size of your typical Spalding basketball. These orbs bobbed softly above three chairs and pulsed hues of purple and orange.
“Excuse me, Ambassador? We were wondering if you had any spare women’s shoes,” Woo-jin said. “And a phone we could use?”
The Ambassador nodded, in deep communication with his guests. He pointed in the direction of the kitchen. Abby’s brain seemed to have been marinated in Novocaine. While the scene before her made no sense, the bewilderment was paradoxically a source of comfort, as though her neocortex had thrown its hands up and neglected to even try to process this otherworldly communion or whatever you wanted to call whatever it was that was going down. She followed Woo-jin, barely able to take her eyes off the beautiful spherical energy forms illuminating the residence with positive vibes. They crossed the kitchen to the room where previously Woo-jin had donned the tracksuit. In a closet they found a selection of fashionable shoes and other garments, many in Abby’s size. Woo-jin excused himself and went to the kitchen while Abby cleaned up and dressed. When she emerged she wore new pants and a jacket in addition to chunky leather shoes. Around them drifted gentle music written by computers in praise of the gorgeousness of nature. Woo-jin handed her a cordless phone. Leaning against the granite counter, Abby called her apartment, Rocco’s cell, the phone numbers of her friends in Vancouver, Rocco’s work, and her apartment manager but nobody answered and no voice mail picked up. It occurred to her that she expected the world to operate a certain way, expected phone calls to be answered and some semblance of causality to provide lines between dots. She expected her intentions to find outlet in actions, consequences, reasons, purposes. But she was being thwarted, teased it seemed, prevented from making decisions that would lead her back to a system of gratification and contentment. There were other forces working, pushing her into an abstract version of the world she assumed she belonged to. She could fight it, jabbing digits into a telephone hoping one of them would pull up a recognizable voice while this weird blinky guy rooted through the fridge—which, by the looks of it, contained some pretty delicious food—or she could take her sense of rationality, stretch its figurative chicken neck across a cutting board, and lop off its head.
Woo-jin slapped together some sandwiches. “I guess you’re probably hungry,” he said.
“I died?” Abby asked.
“At least two times,” Woo-jin said. “I saw your bodies.”
“Can you take me to them?”
Woo-jin shrugged. “I could try. They’re in Dr. Farmer’s morgue.”
Abby asked, “You said you were a writer?”
“I am going to try to attempt to be like a writer. I’m supposed to write a book about how to love people.” It dawned on Woo-jin that this now not-dead girl might have some ideas on how to solve some of his troubles. “Do you think you could help me find my sister? Or help with the writing of How to Love People?”
“Who’s your sister?”
“Patsy.”
“Where is she?”
“She got lifted up in the trailer by a helicopter. She’s a pharmer.”
“Oh,” Abby said. “Did she get taken to a harvesting center?”
“I have no clue,” Woo-jin said, “but she took all my posters with her. And my clothes.”
A sentence queued up in Abby’s brain before it left her mouth, as though it had been memorized for a play. “I need to see my dead bodies.”
Woo-jin still had Dr. Farmer’s business card. He pulled it from his pocket and called the number. Abby watched, surprised, as he proceeded to have a conversation. “Dr. Farmer? This is Woo-jin Kan. Right, the writer. I’m with the dead girl. No, she’s now living. Number three, yes. Okay. What? I’m at the Embassy. Okay. Buh-bye.” Woo-jin pushed the OFF button. “He’s coming over to pick us up in his car.”
“What’s that Ambassador guy doing in the other room with the glowing things?”
Woo-jin shrugged. “Communicating with visiting life forms, I guess. He gets directions from his celestial head. Do you like Dijon?”
Abby accepted the sandwich and sat down with Woo-jin at the little table in the nook.
“Oh no,” Woo-jin said. He fumbled in his pocket for his mouth guard, slipped it in, then flopped out of his chair onto the hardwood floor. Abby loomed over him as the wave of ennui flowed into his corporeal form. This attack didn’t take him anywhere. The house was like some sort of locked box from which he couldn’t mentally travel. Instead he gazed up in bloodshot panic as Abby held his shoulders, as if that would do any good. His eyes went so wide they didn’t look epicanthic anymore, with his face red and lips quivering, with tears actually squirting from ducts, the droplets catching air, raining into little puddles on either side of his head. Whereas usually the suffering had a source, tonight’s suffering was all residue, traces of pain he couldn’t stick to an actual person, diffuse hurts that bled from the Embassy’s hundred years of grievances. Abby called out lamely for help. The door to the kitchen opened and in floated the three orbs, glowing pink, hovering like concerned bystanders. Abby stepped aside as the orbs settled, humming, on Woo-jin’s body. He trembled once more then settled into a fuzzy drowsiness.
The Ambassador entered regally, with Pierre close behind, and waved his scepter in specific but indiscernibly communicative ways. Woo-jin coughed out his mouth guard and rose up on his elbows as the levitating orbs seemed to check out the pantry. “You should invite these orb guys to your place more often, Ambassador.”
Pierre raced to answer the doorbell. The orbs disappeared up a staircase. The Ambassador set about making himself a pot pie. Soon Pierre returned with Dr. Farmer, who looked tanned and reasonable. Upon seeing Abby he smiled broadly. “How fascinating! What a pleasure to meet you alive!”
Blinding whiteness, walls of slabs. Abby hugged herself as the coroner lifted the sheets covering the bodies. There lay two females identical to Abby, the key difference being they were deceased. She winced in embarrassment at their nakedness, as if it belonged to her own body. Abby couldn’t connect this new experience to the experience of snooping through Kylee Asparagus’s mansion or watching the Federicos cavort in a grand ballroom. She couldn’t connect it to what increasingly appeared to be an illusory domestic life with her Bionet engineer boyfriend. She couldn’t connect it to eating a sandwich in a house dominated by glowing spherical life forms. She yearned for plot but instead absurdity after absurdity had been thrown before her, absurdities that alluded to obscured purposes.
“Like I said before,” Dr. Farmer said, picking his teeth with an umbrella-shaped cocktail pick, “we believe that your selfhood, Abby, has gone into superposition. What does this mean? Well, consider a single electron. An electron can be in one place or in a different place, right? And yet we can sometimes find electrons in two places at the same time. So it is with you, apparently. It’s as if you’re both alive and dead simultaneously, and this simultaneity is a self-replicating system in which there are various ‘snapshots’ of your dead self. Which makes an autopsy pretty dang hard, let me tell you.”
A phone rang. The three living people looked to one another, each patting their pockets in that typical moment before someone recognizes the ring tone as their own. It was Abby’s phone. But there was no phone in her pockets. Dr. Farmer leaned over the closest of the two bodies, the one Woo-jin had discovered first, and opened its mouth. Show me yours, show me yours, oh show me yours, ring-toned the phone from inside the corpse’s mouth. With gloved fingers Dr. Farmer pulled it out and answered. “Hello? Yes, just a moment.” He handed it to Abby. “This telephone call is for you.”
Abby placed the somewhat moist phone close to her ear.
“Abby? Dirk Bickle here. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“I want to go home,” Abby said.
“I want you to go home, too, Abby. You’ve been a real champ.”
“I’m not following any more of your directions until you tell me what’s going on.”
“I understand. What do you want to know?”
“I want to know who you are, who you work for, why you really sent me to the Seaside Love Palace, and where Rocco is.”
“You bet. First, as far as my job goes, you can think of me as a curator. Typically a curator is someone in a museum who arranges the art or exhibits, right? In my case, I curate this world. I initiate contacts between people, ensure that certain parties speak to other parties, put people (aka the content) in new contexts. Second, I work for Mr. Kirkpatrick. You can think of Mr. Kirkpatrick as being the head of the museum. The man with the money to acquire new—I don’t want to call them realities but that’s essentially what they are. See how it works? He finds and categorizes and purchases them, and I move them around into the most pleasing arrangements. We needed you at the Seaside Love Palace because we needed a consciousness to move through the world of Kylee Asparagus and the Federicos. We needed someone to discern and imprint their reality, that’s all. Okay, your last question, about Rocco. It’s true you can’t get in touch with him. This will last a couple more weeks. I’m going to be completely honest with you, Abby, because you’ve been so great. He’s going to suffer a little, but ultimately he’ll be okay.”
“What do you mean, suffer? What are you doing to him?”
“We are doing nothing to him. We simply introduced a particular reality he was occupying to a different reality. He will experience some physical pain but, again, I promise you, he’ll end up okay.”
“Why are you doing this to me? What did I do to you people?”
“It feels like some kind of revenge thing, doesn’t it? It’s confusing, and it’s supposed to be. By the way, we paid off your student loans.”
“Who cares about my loans? Tell me where Rocco is!”
“Something’s been nagging me as I’ve been talking to you. Again, I keep referring to ‘realities’ but that strikes me as an overly simplistic way to describe what we’re working with. When I speak of a reality I am really describing the way a particular consciousness or group of consciousnesses encounters matter. Further, how these consciousnesses choose to imagine new configurations of this matter. That’s really the state at which a metaphor of a history museum turns into an art museum. See?”
“I’m coming to Vancouver and I’m going to find Rocco. And after I find Rocco I’m going to find you.”
Usually there’s some sort of explanation for how two people get from one place to another but in this case there really isn’t. One moment Woo-jin and Abby were standing in the morgue with Dr. Farmer, talking to Dirk Bickle on a mobile phone fished from the mouth of one of the dead Abbys. Next they were under a new city’s rain, Woo-jin shivering beneath a plastic tarp in an alley off Robson Street, Abby back at her apartment watching a show.
The passing of garbage trucks and the roaring of clouds for a time comprised the entirety of Woo-jin’s world. A pizza joint’s garbage fed him and discarded pizza boxes provided him with blank pages onto which he wrote his book. He slept in the loading bay of a furniture store on shipping blankets, rose with the sun, and wrote until dusk under a fire escape. In the way that only small, forgotten places can, this smelly and wet alley came to represent the entirety of the universe. At night, through the gauze of light pollution, stars billions of years dead reminded the writer of the futility of his pursuit. He suspected he was an insect in the scheme of things, something to be scraped off the sole of a shoe. But the course of action his meaninglessness implied, to do absolutely nothing, would have caused great offense to the dude at the end of the world and his mystical refrigerator. The dude needed reading material. So Woo-jin wrote.
How are we supposed to love people? To get a handle on the question Woo-jin broke the book into chapters: “How to Love People Who Yell at You,” “How to Love People Who Can’t Wash Dishes,” “How to Love People Who Throw Things at You in the Street.” Was there anyone else he was supposed to love? Oh, right: “How to Love Dead People Who Suddenly Appear Back to Life.”
Woo-jin had yet to return to the mesa at the end of the world or wherever the heck it was. The ennui attacks arrived less frequently now, triggered mostly by weeping faces in magazines, but when they struck they struck more suddenly. These skull-rattling brain fucks tended to show up without a warm-up act. One morning he crumpled on the trash-strewn concrete, vibrating with hideous sadness over a lost-cat poster, thrashing and spitting and eating his own teeth. Somebody wheeled up on a tricycle. When the worst of the tremors had passed Woo-jin was able to open an eye and stare at the spokes, the tire, the rubber-bulbed horn. On the tricycle sat a child with an oversized head and fluffy gray eyebrows. Really the only childlike thing about him was his pudgy body stuffed into red OshKosh B’gosh overalls. In his plump little hand he held a kid-sized Jamba Juice. At the drink’s noisy conclusion he tossed the cup into an open garbage bin. Woo-jin asked this person what he wanted.
“I’m Pangolin,” the person said inside Woo-jin’s mind, the reception a bit scratchy. “I came to show you something.”
Woo-jin coughed snot.
Pangolin climbed off his tricycle and as best he could helped Woo-jin stand, then hopped back on the trike and asked him to follow. They exited the alley, one pedaling, the other limping, tracing a spidery route through the city to the industrial outskirts, past long-ago billboards proclaiming extinct pleasures, to factories dilapidated and overgrown with trees. A creek trickled from the warehouse where Pangolin parked next to other miniature-sized vehicles—bikes, scooters, toy SUVs. He ushered Woo-jin through a doorway. Inside, in vast acreage where stacks of consumer goods had once risen to the rafters, artificial hills speckled with wildflowers undulated. As they traversed this landscape contained within a building, other wee folk emerged from underground burrows through little doors.
“What do you people do here?” Woo-jin asked.
“We’re software engineers,” Pangolin replied. “Some people call us monks. We provide solutions.”
They climbed a hill where a tree grew high enough to brush the ceiling. It was an ancient apple tree, its arthritically twisted trunk creaking and groaning, bark scabbed and scarred. Over the course of a minute the tree blossomed, grew, dropped its fruit, shed its leaves, then blossomed once again as the fallen apples and leaves decomposed to dust. Over and over before Woo-jin’s eyes it repeated this cycle.
“This is our qputer,” Pangolin said. “To install the software patch you have to eat a piece of fruit after it has ripened but before it rots. Go, eat.”
Woo-jin held out his hand and caught an apple. He hesitated, then brought it to his lips. By the time he bit into it the fruit had turned to mush.
“Spit it out,” commanded Pangolin. “That data’s corrupted. You have to eat it faster.”
The next apple Woo-jin quickly bit, chewed, and swallowed. It tasted like any apple. “What is this apple supposed to do?”
“Provide you with a nutritious snack and fix some known bugs,” Pangolin said. “Now you’ll need to return to your alley to get your manuscript, then leave Vancouver as soon as you can before you get DJed.”
“Where am I supposed to go?”
Pangolin shook his head like he was exasperated at having to spell it all out. “Where do you think? New York Alki. You need to find a publisher for your book. Here, take my card in case you have any tech-support issues.”
Pangolin led Woo-jin down the hill, past another qputer monk who was bringing a trembling old blind woman to the tree. As they came to the door, Woo-jin asked, “What about my sister Patsy? Am I going to find her?”
Pangolin shrugged. “Beats me. I’m just a support tech rep.”
Across town, inside her steel and glass cocoon, Abby sat on the couch in her underwear and a T-shirt with no bra, watching a show. She couldn’t remember how long she’d been like this and couldn’t think to try to remember. It was just her body and her show in a room that dimmed with the falling sun and glowed faintly in daylight. There was a refrigerator full of food; Rocco must have gone shopping before he went wherever it was he’d gone. The cabinets were stocked with instant noodles. She ate, defecated, urinated, and watched television. In the early days, television stations went dead at a certain hour and the screen would fill with an image of a fluttering flag. A recording of the national anthem would spizz out of the mono speaker. Abby envied those late-night TV watchers of yesteryear who’d gotten to witness the terminus of a transmission. Slouched in their living rooms with their Funyuns and lukewarm Pepsi in giveaway tumblers decorated with the Hamburglar. The idea that a signal could end. To stare into the linty fuzz allegedly representing a visual echo of the Big Bang. As soon as this show ended, Abby was going to get dressed and find Rocco. Yeah, right. This show was too good. She’d gotten sucked in. Here was Neethan Jordan, strutting up Hollywood Boulevard on the red carpet. A guitar riff looped over the footage, something sharp or flat and nasty that came from four guys in Sweden. It was the kind of music that made you think this Neethan Jordan guy was a menace to society. Better lock up your children ’cause he’s out to corrupt them with his magnificently erogenous body parts. Neethan’s feet strode across the field of red fabric running alongside the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Names scrolled beneath his strutting shoes: Anatole Litvak, Jetta Goudal, Sabu, Nita Naldi. Breaking the fourth wall, Neethan turned to the camera and said, “I don’t know if I’m in my head, in a computer, or in a world that’s actually real!” Cars passed in what looked to Abby like an old-school video toaster montage—a sedan full of gaping, fanged clowns, a grainy Zapruder-film town car convertible with JFK waving from the back seat moments prior to his assassination, an ice-cream man dressed as a carrot leaning out of his window offering Fudgsicles, a gaggle of rambunctious exploitation flick Hell’s Angels. This wasn’t the physical world Hollywood Boulevard, if such a place had ever existed, but some kind of lazy, received idea of it. The red carpet led Neethan to the intersection of North Curson. A gas station, palm trees, abandoned cars. The red path veered to the right, north, into the hills. Here and there the husk of a house. Neethan’s breathing was amplified now, signifying exertion and panic. The sun dropped. A white cat skittered up, considered him for a moment, then dashed into some bushes. Scattered tabloid news rags and hip-hop-branded forty-ouncers across the carpet’s path. All these mansions, shuttered and dormant, gardens overgrown, vines snaking up gates and walls, curling around visionless security cameras mounted on poles. Individuals whose names used to appear in the credits of things that cost $100 million to make once lived here. A palm jutted up through the pavement in the middle of the street. Abby scratched her pubis: scritch scritch. The camera considered the sunset and the onset of utter darkness.
Intertitle: TEN DAYS LATER.
New shot. Exterior. Morning. Neethan asleep on the red carpet. Pan back to reveal the carpet stretched through a semiarid Californian post-FUS landscape. Neethan’s clothes, disheveled from over a week of travel by foot. His lips were flaky, chapped. “This is crazy,” he said. “I can’t keep going on like this. When is this carpet going to end?” And yet he pulled himself to his feet with a swell of music and continued. A shot of the punishing sun, time-lapse images of it rising and setting, the moon, stars pinwheeling across the fast-forwarded night. A commercial for hair-growth cream. A road sign read: DEATH VALLEY. The carpet continued forward, across the desert. The music was martial, percussive, as Neethan stumbled ever onward. Close-up of Neethan’s peeled, delirious face. Finally, amid the sand and ripples of heat, he collapsed face-first on the acrylic carpet.
New shot. Exterior, night, everything lit blue in moonlight. Oops, somehow a boom mic poked into the shot. Neethan still lay passed out on the carpet, which ran alongside a two-lane road. From the distance came the sound of an approaching vehicle. Pinprick-like dots of light that grew larger with the steady increase in volume. Turns out it was an ambulance. After illuminating Neethan in the headlights, the vehicle slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. The back doors squeaked open and a pair of Sikh paramedics hustled to the fallen actor, loaded him onto a stretcher, and inserted him into the ambulance.
There was a montage of close-ups in which the paramedics’ faces were not seen, only their gloved hands manipulating syringes, unscrewing caps off tubes of ointment. They slid an IV into Neethan’s arm, pried his eyelids open and penlighted his pupils, glued electrodes to his forehead, and unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a tanned and waxed six-pack.
Cut to shot of the ambulance, idling on the side of the road in the dark night.
More interior-montage footage, a syringe poked into an ampoule, then into Neethan’s arm. The beeping of machines as the paramedics purposefully went about their business.
Cut to a shot of the ambulance, the doors opening, paramedics carrying Neethan back out on the stretcher, over to the place where he’d reposed. They lifted him from the stretcher and set him prone on the red carpet as the first featherings of dawn appeared on the horizon. Hustling back to the vehicle, the paramedics loaded the stretcher, hopped in after it, then closed the doors as the ambulance spat gravel and zoomed away.
Close-up on Neethan’s face, eyes closed as the day’s first sun rays foreshadowed the brutality of this valley of punishment. His eyes fluttered awake. Medium shot as he rose, stretched, surveyed the blasted landscape. The red carpet extended ahead and behind. Yawning, he stepped forward. Close-up of his shoes, scuffed leather, moving across the carpet.
Wide shot, putting the expansive Western desert on grand display. Up ahead, a figure stood motionless beside the red carpet. Close-up of Neethan squinting. As he drew closer he discerned two people standing side by side. Fifty more paces revealed them to be a man in a suit and a cameraman. Media. The reporter gripped a microphone and seemed to have been conducting hours of preparatory smiling. Neethan cleared his throat and extended his hand in greeting.
The reporter took Neethan’s hand and shook it vigorously. “Hola. Soy Pefas Munoz de las noticias del canal siete.”
“Hi, Pefas, nice to meet you. Glad to be here.”
“¿Qué puede usted decirme sobre su nueva película?”
“¿En inglés o español?”
“Español, por favor.”
“Stella Artaud: Asesino Newman,Temporada Cuatro, es la última temporada en la serie premiada de Stella Artaud: Asesino Newman. Yo interpreto al Doctor Uri Borden, un científico de clónicos quien se involucra en la insurrección y tiene que decidir abortar el Mesías o no. Es una serie estimulante, exhibiendo efectos de los más avanzados y acción en todas partes, con más que un poco de ternura.”
Abby paused the show, unkinked her neck, and shuffled into the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet she propped her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. It was night, she thought. She’d have to look out the window to be certain. After flushing she stood in front of the sink avoiding eye contact with herself. Just a quick peek, she thought, just to see how I’m holding up. She squeezed the porcelain sink lip and tried to raise her head. She found she could only do it if she closed her eyes. Breathing hard through her nostrils, she forced herself to look. Her face was broken out, that was the first problem. It was hard to mess up compliant Eurasian hair, but hers had turned greasy and knotty. Black bags under eyes jittery and blasted red.
“What’s wrong with me?” Abby said, and though she knew well the answer still she refused to admit it. She’d been around people in this shape before. She’d seen Jadie like this. She knew what an embodiment looked like.