Super Flat Times (2 page)
Some maintain that the disappearances, the mass executions, were a gift for the victims; at least they did not have to suffer the indignity of whatever came next. I could not possibly agree more. I saw secret executions from my office window, hundreds of them. I was told not to look, to keep my head down as I riffled through the fabric swatch bricks, but sometimes out of the corner of my eye I could see a single arm flailing on the surface of the thick gray pool, a fleeting, primitive white flag. I’d look away, and when I looked back all that was left was a finger. One time it was a woman’s head. I swear she was looking right at me, staring at me evenly as she sank. I remember thinking only how beautiful she looked, and how utterly calm. I kept thinking about the woman for months afterward. Whenever I thought of her I became irrationally angry. At first, I thought that the anger came from indignation, but eventually, as the thought of sinking into the damp substrate became more tempting, I came to understand it as a kind of jealousy.
And what will you have come away with after the last translated prayer has been read? You who have been fortunate enough to have had the whole history of the Super Flat Times swept from your head by the memory surgeons, so that all you remember is sitting up in the expansive Recovery Hall on Liberation Day with a bandage on your forehead and a sick taste in your mouth, how will you digest this volume? I hope that, above all things, you have not opened this book in order to learn. Because it is not what has been learned in these years that makes those of us who have been allowed to remember crumple with deep nausea every time we look back, but what has
not
been learned, the secret language we have carried in our bodies throughout these ordeals, in spite of them, the navigational matter coiled tightly in our hearts like the springs in a clockwork toy, gestures we sprung on one another in dense, overcrowded basement camps, in regenerative supermarket aisles, in the public showers, fussily breathing whole histories into the ear of whoever should be unluckily close. What we have learned will expire, but these things we have not learned will survive us. We pass these things along despite ourselves, and are nothing more or less than what we do with the rest of our time. Meanwhile, we are swelling with the unthought thoughts, hurling them out into the world like dead skin, temporary hosts for the larger, terminal memory.
Seoul II,
17 Tworuary, 67
Mi Jin Ahn-Strauss
M
y stepfather was among the first to go. Days after he disappeared, we found his wig on the front porch. Whoever had taken him away had brought the wig back. There were things about him that weren’t even worth throwing away. My mother lifted the wig gently, as if it were a hurt animal, and brought it inside. For years no one spoke of his disappearance, and the wig remained on a table in the front hall. Then one day the wig was gone, and my brother found a small headstone in the garden, near a patch of freshly turned soil. He brought me back to show me the grave, and when he pointed at the tiny, misshapen stone he said only, “Get used to this,” before heading out to the barn where he made meat-loaf for the soldiers.
We hardly noticed the first Food Ban. There was a piece on the news about a cabbage virus, and then the cabbage stand was gone from the market. We were secretly relieved about the cabbage — no need to think up new ways to fix
that
particular item. It went this way with the other foods, until only meat was safe. Some people on our street held a small protest at the market, but then they were gone as well. We knew that something was wrong, that something essential was being hoisted from our grasp, but at the same time, meat was the one food we really liked to eat. An all-meat diet was something we’d been unconsciously looking
forward to, like the cooling storm that breaks a heat wave.
Meanwhile, there was a boy in our school who had been held back a year because he was slow. When the new Recruitment Initiative went into effect, he found he was too old to get a good job. He kept asking his parents to make him younger. Every time they told him no. “That is not the direction you were meant to grow,” they said, but he found a way to grow down anyway. He found a way to shed his age by eating pebbles and soaking himself in heavy water. One day he saw the hair on his leg start to retreat. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he thought.
He got a job right away, one of the best available. In a month he was second-in-command at Corporation Two. He bought a high-speed boat, a rare poisonous snake, two rocket launchers, and a magnificent house for his parents. Every night he ate dinner with them at a long wooden table, punctuating the deep silence only to ask mockingly if they would let him grow younger. They only bowed their heads, shamefully forking around massive helpings of beef on gilded plates.
W
e are dragging it by hand now. The engine gave out days ago in a ravine two kilometers south of the parallel. We managed to haul the weapon out of the deep, fecal muck with two stolen mules, which were of no use to us once we ran out of the dried ice cream, the only thing that would get them moving. We killed the mules and ate them, and now we are dragging the Sound Gun by hand, using the last of the rope and medical gauze. No one is happy about this, not even Shaving Gel, whom we call Shaving Gel because he always smells like shaving gel, although we should call him Bulk or Keg or Mountain because he is big. I speculated that he, out of any of them, would champion the cause, shouldering the weapon from behind, barking fiercely at the enlisted men. Instead, he just looked at me evenly from the other side of the campfire, chewing deliberately at his mule as I debriefed the group.
Nobody knows what we are doing here. We are not entirely sure that the war is still happening. Since the mules ate the communications array we have had only the color of the sky to guide us. Evenings, it will burst suddenly into a thin purple halo of dense mist. These rings, we believe, must be the fragrant shards of battles occurring elsewhere in secret. So we continue to plow through the jungle, convinced that, any day now, a dark, backlit man in a business suit will descend from the sky in a clear pod and usher us home.
It was fun to drive around in the Sound Gun until it stopped working. Now the people who are fighting us, and who we are pretty sure are still the enemy, are much more dangerous and harder to kill. They come rushing up at us in the night, tossing sticks and VCRs.
My men go on about the size of the Sound Gun. Everything else is smaller now than in previous wars, but the Sound Gun is unimaginably bigger. “Bigger than what?” I ask Danson in a fit, having overheard this complaint for the last time.
“It’s just bigger than it should be, sir,” says Danson, a slight, walleyed Presbyterian who carries his recently deceased mother’s dialysis machine with him at all times in a bowling ball bag, just in case or as a memento — no one knows for sure. “It should be, like, calculator-size. The size of a handheld — help me someone — think of something handheld . . .”
“A gun,” says Memorex.
“Yes, exactly. All we ask is that the Sound Gun be the actual size of a gun? Instead of, like, a whole building?”
“Write it down in your Wish Journal, Private,” I tell him. Everyone has a Wish Journal. When we’re sad or upset or feeling violent we write in the Wish Journal. “I wish I could wrap my feelings in burlap and throw them into the ocean,” we might write, or “I wish the act of sleep actually came with a blanket” or “I wish just one of my fellow soldiers was even remotely as attractive as the ones in the advertisements on the cloud screens, the ones climbing wooden structures with their shirts off or getting pummeled with a long, padded brick.”
The Sound Gun has four settings. The first one is Make Scared. Make Scared makes a big loud noise that makes people scared. It is louder and scarier than the noise a bomb makes as it explodes, because the people we’re fighting have not been scared by that sound for three wars. The sound that Make Scared makes is like a herd of elk tumbling into a cauldron of hot, resonant dung or, at night, the frail puff of air conjured up by a dying child. Make Scared worked for a while, but then the enemy started putting soaked wheat pods in their ears, so we had to move on to Hurt.
Hurt feels like getting hit hard by a rubber blanket. Not that I’d know — this is what the instructions tell us: “Stay out of the path of the Sound Gun when using Hurt mode; otherwise, you may be struck by the slug with the force of a large rubber blanket.” Hurt worked for a longer time than Make Scared, because nobody liked having these rubber blankets constantly hurled at her. But the enemy developed a flared aluminum instrument, worn on the hips, that sprayed a hard yellow foam so that they could build tall, ad hoc baffles while advancing on us. We were left with no alternative: we had to switch to Very Hurt.
All the officers have been given a captured enemy soldier as a pet. I’m sickened by this practice, but own one myself and have to admit I have grown considerably dependent on the little man. In an attempt to distance myself from some of the more undesirable aspects of the relationship, I’ve named him Constantine. It’s a dignified name, I think — much more dignified than Bastard Face, Shovel, or Milk of Magnesia, names that have been bestowed upon others in our midst. He has not, as of yet, become comfortable with it. Otherwise, he plays the role of slave with outrageous conviction, leaning into his servitude with an enthusiasm that mars my ability to sympathize with his plight. I want him to be belligerent or distant — anything but eager. Each morning by the time I wake up he’s already gone off looking for kindling or is turning the spit on which a tube of meat product sizzles over a roaring fire. It is the worst, most diabolical revenge, and he knows it.
Very Hurt mode kept the enemy at bay for a good while. During that time, though, we heard from headquarters less and less. We started getting stark, austere communiqués like “Swell forest,” “Stab the fabric cone,” and “Fork” — dense, barely pronounceable phrases, indicating a new plateau of military strategy no one in our ranks could unpack. Our objective here, once clear and urgent, had faded into obscurity. The mission had become so secret that it had disappeared altogether. This made us angry, and tired. No one wanted to deal with all of the Very Hurt soldiers lying around, as they had to be dragged out of the path of the Sound Gun before we could move it. With no one to instruct us otherwise, we cranked up the gun from Very Hurt to Make Dead. Make Dead ruptures the enemy’s bowels as the blast hurls them twenty feet or more into the air. In Make Dead mode the frequency is so low that you can no longer hear the gun as it fires — only the sound the enemy soldiers make as they sail through the air, limbs flapping like damp cloth.
I do not miss home, but not for the usual reasons. I like home, generally, but I do not like home the way that I left it — with a large wild bobcat living there. I came home one night and found Gruver on all fours, peering under the couch, where the bobcat was hiding. As the bobcat was a very large animal, this was not the best place to hide. The couch was balanced on its back, see-sawing back and forth while Gruver offered up warm, encouraging aphorisms.
“I do not want to hear it,” he said when I asked what was under the couch. I did not then know that what was under the couch was, in actuality, a bobcat. A bobcat, at that time, was one of the very last things I was thinking of.
“I found this beautiful animal in the garbage can, and it is now mine,” Gruver called out from the floor.
“Clearly,” I said.
“I will not hear any arguments against my case.”
I saw that Gruver’s left arm was bandaged with a shredded, bloodied T-shirt. “It’s nothing,” he said preemptively, cupping the wounded elbow with his free hand.
I went upstairs and ate a Starburst on the bed.
“Why don’t you come down here,” Gruver shouted from the bottom of the stairs. “Why don’t you come down and put your hand on this animal’s flanks? Feel the strength just lying there, dormant.”
“It’s sulking,” I called out. “It is bringing down the whole house with that attitude.”
“He’s been abandoned. I believe that this animal has got a definite right to sulk?”
I had been with Gruver for seven years. Suddenly, it did not seem like such a good idea.
“Constantine,” I call out from my tent. He sits cross-legged by the fire, facing away from me, worrying the coals with a slender branch. His shadow flickers wildly on the green nylon wall of the tent, the shape of his body crassly drawing attention to itself, showboating there behind him on the makeshift scrim, taunting me with the suggestion that, given half the chance, it might swallow me whole, enveloping the tent itself, the camp, everything we have brought along. “Constantine, bring me my flask.” He does not move. He wants me to call him by his given name, which is Idrissa. He sits and waits.
On my way to the latrine I see Memorex sitting on a felled tree, writing in his Wish Journal.
“Well, hard at work, I see,” I say, trying to amount to something in his mind.
“I’m just writing,” he says.
I kneel at his side, laying a hand on his thigh, giving it a brief, reassuring squeeze. It is not an advance; I’d rather dip my face into a bucket of glass shards than sidle up to Memorex’s whitened, porous midriff, but it’s taken as such, and I get a frightened grimace.
I pull my hand away. “Sometimes the hurt goes away when we talk, too.”
Memorex rests his pen in the spine. “I wish we weren’t killing people.”
The phrase “killing people” jars me — in my mind it isn’t so much killing people that we are engaged in as pushing them out of the way, except that they stay there, wherever they topple, forever. “Well, Memorex, you know that’s not a Wish Journal wish. That’s not a feeling. You can’t, you know, put that anywhere.”
“I feel something about it, though. To see all those people go flying up in the air, all, like, ruptured? I feel something when that happens. It’s, like, really a feeling, like getting hit in the face with a basketball again and again —”