The sun was beating down on my head but my legs were cool, dangling in the dark water of Halmae's pond. Crickets hummed in the bushes behind me and a magpie squawked in a tree. My favorite dream.
My net had dredged up so much mud that I couldn't see the bottom of the pond anymore. Three fat salamanders[1] hid as best they could in the strings of pondweed that floated in Halmae's white tray. Hoping they'd become friends I tilted the tray a little, making them tumble together, but they scuttled away from each other and wedged themselves into three white corners.
"Wannya, Jun-su?[2]" I looked up to see Abba sitting next to me, his legs dangling into the muddy water too.
"Abba!" Seeing him always made my heart buoyant with joy. But something was wrong in this dream; my heart felt raw and tender, like it was filling up with all the tears I'd cried since I'd lost him.
When I was younger I'd have long winding conversations with Abba at the edge of the dream-pond. These days I couldn't recall the sound of his voice, having not heard it for so many years, so Abba would just sit silently with me. But I knew that his voice was memorized forever inside me, somewhere on a special shelf up high in my brain. If I was lucky the memory of his voice would occasionally topple off the shelf and into my dreams.
"Ghenchana, Abba[3]?"
He looked the same as he always had. Too-big lips and a scratchy beard. Permanently rolled-up shirtsleeves. He lifted his eyeglasses and squinted at me in the sun. "Momi anjoa[4]."
I dreamed about him at the edge of Halmae's pond so often, that I suspected that he must have broken the news to me there, all those years ago.
I turned to tell him that we'd take care of him and that everything would be OK. But he'd already gone. "Abba! Gajima![5]"
He hadn't stayed long enough.
Crickets stopped buzzing and birds fell silent. The sun hid, plunging me into gloom. Or perhaps it was already twilight. Abba might stay for seconds, or for hours, but the dream always ended with me all alone at the edge of the dream-pond, with my heart full of tears.
But this time, the dream went on.
My reflection on the water's surface fractured over and over as my legs kicked up muddy swirls. A pale shape shifted through the gloom and weeds at the bottom of the pond. It stopped below my feet, lurking, then slowly it rose to the surface.
I couldn't see what it was at first. Long and white, it rose up between tangled weeds and eddies of muddy foam. Hazy sunlight caught on a bright glinting patch at one end as it rose. The thing broke the surface, the patch gleaming brighter. It was the sun reflecting off Abba's glasses over his closed eyes. His body rolled, settling against my legs, and I found myself staring into Abba's still face. White and cold, just how he'd looked on the day that he died.
My only thought was to run to the house and bury myself in Halmae's arms. But my legs were lead-filled things, immovable. My eyes were frozen in their sockets, unable to look away from Abba's face.
Bubbles rose where Abba's withered hand grazed my knee. There was something else coming to the surface.
Rising from the dark water was another corpse, pale and rotting. His limbs hung limp as his chest bobbed gently on the water next to Abba. His face looked the same as always, though mud and reeds clung to his cheeks. Halbae.
Then, another body shot up from the depths, breaking through a blanket of thick weeds. Her eyes were sunken, her gray hair plastered across her forehead by the pondwater. She came to rest at Halbae's side, their temples touching, as if even in death they still found each other, like two magnets. Halmae.
My heart broke open, the tears burning my insides as they flowed out. I sobbed but couldn't hear my voice, as if the black pond was absorbing all sound and taking it to the depths.
I clawed at my face until blood oozed under my nails, pulled at my hair until great clumps came away. Bent double, I screamed into the dirt of the flowerbed, but the dream wouldn't end. Something else stirred at the bottom of the pond. Another pale thing.
There was no hope of turning away. I lay rigid, transfixed as the fourth body climbed. Her head rose above the water momentarily, then dipped again so that just her face was at the surface, reunited with Abba again. Eomma's sweet face, but bloated and sallow like she'd been dead for days and the waters had half-rotted her. How had I killed everyone I loved?
"Eomma, yongseohae[6]!" I cried, burying my face into the mud of the flowerbed. My heart faltered, slowed, then stilled. The garden darkened until I was lost to the blackness.
"You OK?" His silhouette was illuminated in his bedroom doorway, stifling a yawn with one hand, pulling down a T-shirt with the other.
Fuck off, Will.
I'd been mouse-quiet. I couldn't possibly have woken him. "You're a ridiculously light sleeper."
He padded to the sofa on silent feet and sat with me, elbows on knees, staring into the soot-blackened window of the wood burner.
"What do you want, Will?"
He took a while to answer, like he'd learned how many seconds to wait before my ire turned into sadness. "I just...don't like that your dreams make you scream," he said, his voice raspy from disuse.
"Scream?" I hadn't been screaming. I'd have known if I'd screamed. At least, I hadn't heard myself scream.
A wave of guilt lifted goosebumps on me. Of course, I must have screamed. Will would have been forced to check on me each time I'd screamed. In fact, he'd be a cold-hearted asshole to not check on me if I screamed myself awake like a fucking lunatic every night.
"I'm so sorry." I dropped my head into my hands. Why the fuck couldn't I get my shit together? Before I knew it, my throat was rolling from the effort not to cry.
For fuck's sake, Zeph.
My traitor body didn't wanna cooperate with me, and stupid fucking huge tears started to roll down my face faster than I could brush them away. The blue sofa blanket appeared around my shoulders.
"I'm sorry I'm like this." The burst of tears had helped, and I quickly dried my eyes, determined not to shame myself anymore. "I'll be fine when I get home."
"You escaped from Sigma a week ago." Will gazed at the log burner as if there was a roaring fire in there. "And you're mourning your grandparents."
He'd compacted the horrors of my dreams into two truths. Sigma was still haunting me, and I was grieving. Again. Not that I'd ever really stopped grieving for Abba. Eomma had made it kinda difficult for us to move on.
"I'm sorry. I'm not coping with this very well, am I?" I said with a pathetic little laugh.
"You never have to be sorry for this, Zeph," Will whispered.
I grimaced down at my underwear. "OK. Then I'm sorry for putting my junk on your Mom's sofa."
Will laughed, a rumble from his chest that I felt more as vibrations than as audible sound. "Don't worry about it," he said. "Listen. You don't have to tell me what's in your dreams. But why do they make you scream?"
I chanced a quick scan of the half-arranged thoughts littering the shelves in my mind: ponds and salamanders and embassies and guns. There was no way I could articulate any of that shit to Will. But he gave me the beginnings of a smile to help me.
Courage, Zeph.
"The first few nights I screamed because...I dreamed that Cal was gonna kill me."
"Cal was your boss in Sigma."
"Yeah, kinda."
"Did he...hurt you?"
"No, not really," I shrugged. He just...threatened to shoot me through the heart every now and then."
Will's eyes bulged as wide as dinner plates. "You know you're safe here, don't you?"
"Yeah. I know."
"What happened tonight?"
My tears threatened to fall again. Just like I'd ruined my family, I'd ruined my favorite dream of Abba enjoying the pond. Now it was evil and rotten, spoiled in my memory forever. I never wanted to think about the dream again, let alone recall it to Will. But I knew exactly why I'd had the dream, and why I'd screamed.
I breathed in slowly, steeling myself, wondering how the truth would sound on my lips. "The Embassy can't find my Mom because she doesn't wanna be found."
I hadn't really admitted it to myself until that moment. Since my email to Eomma had bounced back I'd toyed with the possibility, but now it was out, impossible to ignore.
"I don't understand."
"Nobody accidentally goes off the radar in Korea. Everyone has enough ID that they're traceable. Erica Choi can't find my Mom because she must have deliberately removed herself from any ID-related database in Korea."
Will's eyebrows worked. "Do you think she's OK?"
"Well, she's alive. Her death would have been registered if it had happened, just like for my grandparents."
"Why did she...disappear?"
"I guess it's because she doesn't want me to find her...because of what I did."
He leaned back on the sofa, running his hands through tangled hair. "What did you do, Zeph?"
Where was I supposed to start? I'd done so much to hurt my family. Would things be the same between us if Will knew?
"I wasn't exactly the best-behaved kid ever. I caused my Mom a lot of trouble. I think that it started when I lost my Dad when I was seven. He contracted non-Hodgkin lymphoma, maybe from work, and died about a year later."
"I'm really sorry about your Dad," said Will. "You were so young."
"Yeah."
I didn't know what else to say in reply. I wished that I'd been older, so that I'd had more time to spend with him, more time to build up memories.
"Where did he work?"
"L.K. Chemical[7]. He and my Mom were chemical engineers. My Mom thinks that my Dad's cancer was caused by chemical exposure during a polymer project in L.K.'s chemical plant in Seoul. My Mom tried to get compensation from L.K., but there wasn't conclusive evidence that chemical exposure caused it. I don't know if it was losing my Dad, or my Mom's stupid drawn-out quest for compensation that kinda...fucked us all up."
"Did she want money from L.K.?"
"Yeah. But more than that, she wanted them to admit that they'd done it. Me and Sora wanted her to let it go, but she wouldn't, and it made us...never really stop grieving for him."
"Who's Sora?"
The thought of seeing her lifted me a little. She was the way to get home. I needed to tell Erica Choi to make the Embassy start searching for her address, or Kang-min's.
"She's my sister. Sora was eleven when we lost my Dad. She went pretty weird. Since his death, Sora was always so careful not to upset my Mom, even if it meant lying to her. She never told my Mom about term papers, boyfriends, football matches, shit that my Mom should have been supporting Sora with, but she didn't because she didn't know.
"Maybe if my Mom had had that stuff to focus on, she'd have...lived more in the present. Instead she was stuck in the past, and not realizing that my sister was growing up and needed her."
"What about you?" Will whispered.
Our voices had gotten quieter as our conversation had worn on, and it was hard to make out his words.
"I was angry with L.K. for taking my Dad, but money, or making them admit guilt wasn't gonna bring him back. I guess I took it out on my Mom. I was a total shit to her, and then exams took so much of my energy that I didn't have time to be angry.
"By the time I was fifteen my grandma was getting ill, and we were running out of money too, so my Mom was stressed as fuck. To get into med school I needed perfect grades, and extra-curricular piano and football and whatever-the-fuck else. Instead of being a total dick to my Mom all the time, I ended up just not telling her anything, just like Sora did. My Mom was already so messed up with so many worries, there was no point adding my shit on top.
"I spent a lot of time getting drunk and high, and sleeping around. My Mom just pretended that she didn't know anything, because then she wouldn't have to deal with me, but she knew that I was a fuck-up. Everyone did."
My throat strained to swallow back tears, but slowly and painfully, like pulling teeth, my words had come out.
"Zeph, your Mom wouldn't leave you just because you were a difficult kid."
Will was too innocent. He was hoping that this was me worrying over nothing. Will's Mom demanded more from him than mine ever had, but she was also Will's best friend; he'd never know what it was like to deal with guilt.
"I know that. It wasn't only because of that. It must have hurt her so much when I got myself kidnapped, and my grandparents too. They'd already lost my Dad and then they had to deal with me-"
"Zeph, don't say that." Will pleaded.
"Say what?"
"You didn't get yourself kidnapped. Sigma kidnapped you."
You totally got yourself kidnapped, idiot.
I started to tremble with shame at the very thought of confessing more. The fact was that Will didn't know shit about the situation and wouldn't understand. Will didn't lust after guys like I did. Will was never coked-up and thirsty at parties that he should never have gone to.
"Will, I wasn't an innocent kid who just got kidnapped. I walked right into it."
At that, Will stood, then padded to his bedroom on light feet. I thought that he was done with me, and my heart started to hammer so hard that I broke into a prickly sweat. But then Will returned clutching a hoodie and a pair of sweats.
"Oh yeah. I'm a little cold."
"Cold is an understatement. Here."
He tossed the bundle of clothes at me. I wriggled into them, pulling the hood over my head and tightening the strings.
"I know it's hard, but I want you to...not wake up screaming again. Can you tell me what happened?"
"It's late, and I've totally fucked up your sleep, and-"
Will gave me another one of his semi-smiles. "I don't care about that."
If I got it over with quickly we'd both be able to get back to sleep. I took a breath.
"When I came to the States I found summer school super-easy. Apart from a few experiments which were sometimes kinda tough, I'd already done most of the classes in high school, or I'd read ahead and knew the material. So I spent a lot of time getting baked. And chasing guys.
"I'd seen this hot guy at a couple of parties in Este. He'd paid me attention, but he was always with beautiful women, and I figured that he was probably straight and flirting because he was bored, and my two study-buddies said that he was way out of my league anyways.
"A few days before my flight back to Seoul, I was pretty drunk and coked-up at another party in Este, and I'd lost my dorm friends way back earlier in the night. I should have gone back to my dorm hours before. But then I saw that guy across the room.
"He was so hot, like a perfect American man from a movie or something. Blond and tall and surrounded by pretty women, and everyone was listening to him and laughing, like he was the only guy in the room.
"I couldn't believe it when he came over to talk to me. His name was Noah. He was such a cool guy, and so funny. He told me goofy stories about his friends, and he asked me so many questions about my family, and about what life is like in Korea. It was so good to just talk about myself, and rant about my Mom and med school, and missing my Dad. Before I knew it, I'd poured my heart out to him."
My voice faltered. I wasn't sure if could go on. Will's face had paled. His terrified eyes stared unblinking at me, like he knew how it was going to end.
"Don't say more if you don't wanna," Will whispered through his teeth, as if his jaws were locked shut.
But my throat was already bobbing in anticipation of unshed tears. I had to go on.
"Noah asked me to come outside with him, and we sat on the porch steps, and...and..."
I pulled the hoodie laces tighter.
Courage, Zeph.
"...he started kissing me. I was so happy. I thought that I was the luckiest guy in the world. He asked me if I wanted to go somewhere to be alone. I jumped at the chance. He drove me to Plaza del Este, to an old office building. We went up the stairs into a corridor of hotel rooms. I thought that Noah was staying there. I'd been with plenty of guys before, but this was different. He...he..."
My voice had gone so quiet that I wondered if Will had heard me.
Will stared into the dark glass square of the log burner, his hands shaking as much as mine. "Don't stop."
Will's expression was blank and his eyes were dull, like his very essence had retreated from his body somehow. This had already been too much for him to listen to.
"He said things to me," I whispered.
"What kind of things?" Will's head jerked towards me, ill-fitting rage in his voice.
"Things to make me wanna stay in Maria. He said that...he thought that he loved me. And that I didn't need to go to med school, and that I could stay with him, and that we could be together. In my heart I knew that he wasn't really serious. But I didn't wanna go to med school, I didn't wanna go back to my Mom, and..." my voice thickened, dangerously close to tears, "...I'd been so lonely. For a few moments I imagined what it could be like with him, and it was...everything I wanted.
"But when we'd gotten dressed, a man came into the room. Cal. He...he put his gun to my head. Somehow Noah had taken my phone, wallet and passport from my jeans. He'd wanted my passport all along, and he'd wanted me because I was the input needed to activate all the biometric devices in it. That's all I was to him.
"After they took my DNA and iris scans, they tried to ransom me, but my family were too poor for that to work. And the Korean government probably told Sigma to go fuck themselves and kill me while they were at it. After that I was a rental asset, unless Cal ever found a reason to kill me. But he never did."
Will's rage seemed to have simmered, and he shook his head, eyebrows knotted. "Why did he do that?"
"For my passport, and ransom-"
"No, why did he...say those things to you first?"
"I used to ask myself that all the time when I joined Sigma. In those days I thought about Noah a worrying amount. I used to fantasize that the funny, kind Noah at the party was a different guy from the Noah who'd kidnapped me. I hated him so much. I'd daydream about seducing and killing him somehow. Or stealing Cal's gun and shooting him." I shivered under the blanket and hoodie, waves of ice-cold shame advancing along my limbs. "Or just...asking him why he'd hurt me so much. But...Noah's just like that. He plays with his food before he kills it. He probably loves that he was both the guy who put me in Sigma, and the best fuck I'll ever have. He loves tormenting Cal and Ollie and other managers too. It's why he's so high up in Sigma when he's only in his thirties; he just puts people into position and climbs up their bodies."
Will's face was gaunt, and covered in a sheen of sweat. "Did you see him again?"
"He came to Seven a few days later to tell Cal that he'd been appointed as the new manager of male rental assets. Cal hates rental assets, and he was so pissed off he nearly had a heart attack. I never saw Noah after that, apart from glimpses of him in Seven's lobby, or at La Rosa."
"La Rosa?"
"Yeah. It's an old longliner that's dry-docked on Estrella wharf."
"I know it," Will said, barely a whisper.
"One of the Sigma companies bought it and turned it into a casino about a year ago. I had to play piano there when Jones hosted parties. Most of the time I just fucked around playing arpeggios and doing stupid shit."
I laughed under my breath. It was kinda amusing how much shameless delight I got out of murdering Gaspard de la Nuit on a Boston Grand, and nobody in La Rosa noticed.
"I got into Sigma because I was a total fucking imbecile. Too busy chasing dick to realize that I was being kidnapped. And I was always too high to escape. Or too scared of Cal. I should have just let him end me and gotten out of Seven in a bag, rather than endure that fucking place as long as I did."
"Zeph, please don't ever say that."
"I'm sorry. I've been talking way too much, we need to sleep and-"
"Zeph, listen to me." Will ran his hands down his beard like he was preparing the words, and then spoke, deep and sotto voce. "You were nineteen. You met someone who pretended to be just like you. Friendly. And fun. And honest. But he wasn't any of those things. He was a human trafficker. He lied to you to get close to you, and he kidnapped you. Sigma would have killed you if you'd tried to leave. There's no way that your family would ever think that was your fault, or that you didn't try hard enough to get out."
"If I hadn't been so thirsty I'd-"
"No, Zeph. Don't blame yourself for falling for a charismatic person who lied to you." Will's terror seemed to have been replaced by a terrible sadness. "You can see how anyone could have been tricked like that, can't you?"
"I...I guess." Still, if I hadn't been so drunk and high I might have seen Noah's attentions for the ruse that they were. "I should have realized when he said all that shit about not wanting me to go back to Korea," I said, marveling for the millionth time at how gullible I'd been. I pulled my hood off my head, too hot with the shame of it all.
"You don't think that people can...connect like that...after only knowing each other a few hours?"
It was a strangely optimistic question from Will, after the conversation's earlier gloom. Perhaps not after a few hours, but I'd seen Raheem and Miles fall in love within days. I knew that it could happen.
"I do! Just that," I sniggered, too exhausted to be upset anymore, "I'm so annoying that most guys can't spend longer than an hour with me, so we never find out."
Will chuckled with a shake of his head, like how he did when Mozhgan said some probably legit hilarious shit into his ear in Farsi. "Are you OK with being in Santa Elena for a week or two longer than you'd hoped?"
"Yeah, I'm OK. Sorry I've been moping around. I love being here."
Even if it wasn't Eomma telling me herself, the shelves in my brain felt a little tidier and emptier after Will's assurance that the stupid shit I'd done might actually be forgivable.
"So, when I get back from María maybe we can start doing stuff that you like, until you go home?"
"Get back from María?"
I hadn't realized that Will was going anywhere. I didn't wanna be alone. I was tempted to ask him to give me a ride to the Korean Embassy and leave me with Erica Choi for a couple of days.
"It's just for Saturday," he said. "I'm gonna go see my Mom. I'll be back Saturday night."
It was remarkable how difficult he found it to be away from Mozhgan. I couldn't understand it. Since high school I'd avoided being around Eomma as much as possible, and assumed that I'd do the same when I got home.
I wondered guiltily what it would be like if Eomma had the same illness as Mozhgan, just sitting there, a quiet remnant of her former self. What would it be like to have Eomma's warm presence with me in a room, but without all her nerves?
Pretty fucking zen.
"Is Mozhgan gonna be ready to come home soon?"
"I think so. I'm talking to the doctor about her progress Saturday." Will was already smiling at the thought of it. "And I need to take her more food; she's running out."
"You're still making her food? Damn, all the other patients are gonna be jealous, man!"
If Eomma ever found out about Will's devotion to his Mom she'd probably never stop talking about him. I resolved to never talk about Will to her, apart from the whole pulling me from a fire thing. And being the guarantor for my visa. And feeding me, and clothing me, and being my honorary American Mom, and therapist.
As I drifted off to sleep I wracked my brain for a gift to send Will when I got back to Korea. The best food processor in the world? An Italian coffee machine? Another surfboard? They all seemed so inadequate. Perhaps he'd been right about me never needing to pay him back. His life in Santa Elena was so simple that it didn't seem like he needed anything, apart from his electrical equipment, and Mozhgan, and the zephyrs coming off the ocean.
Author's Notes:
[1] Korean salamander: most common salamander species on the Korean peninsula, found in Korea's longest river, the Nakdong, that flows through the city of Daegu where Zeph's grandparents lived in this story. The entire Nakdong ecosystem, as well as numerous other fragile Korean habitats unique to the peninsula, are under threat from dam-building, water pollution and wetland habitat destruction from Korea's urbanisation and heavy industry. You might have read recent high-profile news stories about Jiyul, Korea's environmental activist nun, who has gone on hunger-strike to campaign against the destruction of salamander habitats in Korea, as well as leading other eco-activist movements to call for the Korean government to regulate environmental damage by industry.
[2] Wannya, Ju-su?: Korean, "What's up, Jun-su?"
[3] Ghenchana, Abba?: Korean, "Are you OK, Dad?"
[4] Momi anjoa: Korean, "I'm not feeling well."
[5] Gajima!: Korean, "Don't go!"
[6] Yongseohae: Korean, "Forgive me"
[7] L.K. Chemical: fictional Korean chemical and electronics company, similar to real-life Korean chemical giants like Samsung, SK Chemicals, LG Chemical