The Last City of Ours

For as long as I remember, Chorip-si has been the last city beyond. We Seoul residents call it the city, a curt flash of disdain in fast-diverging conversations. Mother’s no different. Between licks at the spatula, she likes to vent that we're better off without another city far south on the peninsula, whose human civilization is down to one hell of an overcrowded capital city. It’s like having a third dimple, she says. Everything we need is right at our fingertips here, the best and only place to settle in, and why ever migrate? We have arrived. We’re home.

Then, of course, she says how all that city-building budget should have gone into supporting already existing children and single-parent families like ours. But those big heads, of course, wanted a big flashy project instead.

So it goes, when Mother shows up in a bulky electronic SUV armed with off-road tires and starts to load it with all our stuff one day, I don’t suspect we’re headed for Chorip-si of all places, even though it’s the only other place left of the country. Only after a pit stop, as we steer onto a highway, does she suddenly chirp. “Do you remember Auntie Soon? My sister?”

Of course I do–mostly from what Mother says of her family: we live apart, and stay apart. Also the fact of Auntie’s mailing address outside Seoul.

“Chorip-si will grow on you.” Mother says with a dangerous lilt in her voice. She doggedly doesn’t look in my direction.

For as long as I remember, my country has been a stretch of endless desert in the South and deforested subtropics in the North, a climate patchwork like pre-Deflation California. It’s hard to believe this peninsula once was a land of green mountains with four seasons. Now virtually all of the several millions of citizens live in Seoul, and unlike Mother, I’ve never even heard people call the country by anything but Seoul–the only relevant point of reference now–not even its official name, Korea. And like most citizens of my ever-deflating country, I haven’t seen the desert with my own eyes, let alone ride through it in the passenger seat of one bumpy SUV. By the time the distant contours of Chorip-si come into view, not just our SUV’s tread grooves but its windshield is also stained with red mud.

It was almost a decade ago that the government launched a national project to build this inhabitable city in the South in order to coax its complacent, heavily birth-controlled Seoul citizens into multiplying in a new nest. Coincidentally, the city’s name means the first to stand. But the project failed, owing to the lukewarm public interest, and in part, its overtly desperate campaign, leaving the city full of construction sites and largely empty with fewer than ten thousand residents. Ever since the Last War, most of the government’s projects to revert people back to the pre-Deflation time have failed, but who can blame us? We’ve learned the hard way how progress becomes our undoing.

In the middle of Chorip-si lies a cluster of skyscrapers, most abandoned halfway to completion. They soar on all sides of an island of marked-off concrete slab, which was supposed to be a placeholder for a floating garden to come in later. From there, roads fan out in every direction, until the desert cuts through and cloaks all things urban. Auntie’s apartment is located at the north end of the city, in one of the few districts with working plumbing, where the residues of a nearby desert cover the exteriors of the buildings all year round. On our way north, I hardly see any cars and catch glimpses of only a couple passengers. The city stands shrouded in silence. And it is clean—not a single candy wrapper rolling along the street, not a stain of cigarette butts. Too clean.

I cower in the back seat and think: I’ll be stranded here for the rest of my life.

Our SUV climbs a red hill and stops at a huge glass door to the first fifteen-story building of Auntie’s apartment complex, where a scrawny woman stands, her legs uncomfortably apart. She’s stooping as if burdened by the weight of her voluptuous hair and breasts. Upon sighting me, she shades her eyes with an emaciated hand, though she’s standing in the shadow of the awning.

“She hasn’t changed a bit.” Mother says with a strange pleasure. She beams as she repeats loudly, “You haven’t changed a bit!” at Auntie Soon now well within earshot. Auntie flatly says when Mother rolls down the window on my side. “The elevator’s out of order. It always is.”

The climb to the eighth floor, where Auntie lives, takes an excruciating ten minutes, and the whole time none of us makes small talk. Auntie’s the one to lead, and I climb a few paces behind Mother, who takes her time to rest every landing and massage her ankles. Soon there’s a fresh run in one leg of Mother’s pantyhose, a growing chink of striking white.

At a glance, I can tell that Auntie’s two-bedroom apartment has been neglected. The wallpaper and wooden floor show no threat of imminent wear, but most pieces of furniture need polishing and minor repairs, with nothing matching anything in color or design. A few dust bunnies have collected in all corners of the living room. While Auntie disappears into the kitchen, I follow Mother into the living room, where she flops down on an old leather sofa. I sit by Mother, already heavily sweating, but no AC is there to whir to life, no eco-friendly fan everyone I know has. Beads of sweat gather on Mother’s forehead as she too sits blank-faced. Her fingers wander over the arm of the sofa and find a jagged rip. I watch her fingers crawl into the rip and begin clawing at it. First working from the edges, which Mother chips away in little flakes, then slowly tearing the leather in a thin, spiral strip as if it were a fruit.

Auntie appears with an armful of laundry. Lets it fall in a heap on the table, and makes her way back to the kitchen. After repeating the loop a few times, she sits in a spindle-back chair and folds the laundry at the dining table. Still no one says a word. The rip—already a gaping hole—yawns bigger and bigger.

Then I see it: some kind of paper sticking out the rip. Mother must have felt it too, because she finally stops ripping and throws a quick glance down at the paper. She abruptly raises her eyes to stare at Auntie, and almost as abruptly drops her gaze. Tight-lipped, she folds both of her hands on her lap.

Without looking up, Auntie asks: “Are you staying for lunch?”

It’s almost eight in the evening. Right there and then I know: she can’t afford two kids, nor does she want to.

A year, Mother says, and she will come back for me, but until then, I should listen to Auntie and behave. I want to ask why I can’t tag along, but her expression warns me against it. She acts as if I’m four instead of fourteen, but even at four I would have known something was really wrong and maybe a year would become two, and possibly more than that.

Not long after Mother slips out of the apartment without a ceremonial goodbye, Auntie tells me to unpack and also goes out. The room Auntie told me I’d share with my cousin is furnished with a desk, a closet about my height, and the bunk bed. I wonder why her daughter—my cousin, an only child like myself—has a bunk bed. It sure isn’t a welcoming gesture, seeing how enthusiastic Auntie’s about my stay. I walk around the apartment, peeking in the master bedroom, the small kitchen, the only bathroom, and go back to the living room, where I examine the paper—undoubtedly money—sticking out of the arm of the sofa. I tug at the paper to extricate it from the hole. Why does anyone need a hiding place like this, I wonder, especially one living in such an empty city?

The bill feels damp to my touch, fluttery at the edges. Once it’s out, I see there are quite a few more—all five ten-thousand wons. I reach for the rest.

“Stealing already?”

I almost jump, and turn to find my cousin standing out on the veranda, a blurry, backlit silhouette. I haven’t noticed her presence in the apartment. She must have snuck in and hidden there—the one place I didn’t think to investigate—and I suspect, waited to catch me off guard, holding the bag. Slightly squinting, my cousin appraises me with a piercing gaze that doesn’t suit her age—fifteen.

“Just giving myself a dime tour since nobody is.”

She walks over to study the rip. “You ruined the sofa.”

Though her voice doesn’t betray any hint of serious accusation, I feel a blush setting in my cheeks right away. I explain in murmurs that I’m not the one responsible, that Mother did it, of course, meaning no harm though, and she doesn’t usually do such childish things, it’s one of those nervous tics, and needless to say, not to be disrespectful or anything, and as I go on, I feel growing anger at my cousin. I finally stop the rant, realizing she’s finding it rather amusing.

“I see you’re no thief,” says my cousin. “Not that there’s much to steal. Anyways, a few bills won’t get you far in this stink hole.”

She tucks back the folded bills deep in the rip, smoothing out the rucks they make underneath the leather. Then she declares, definitively: “I like you, Cousin.”

While I stand blankly, still taken aback by this sudden hospitality, she goes on to shoot me a warning. “Oh, and call me Sanho. Don’t you call me unnie. I know we’re just months apart, at most.”

So she hasn’t escaped the fate of dollimja—Korean tradition of the whole clan of the same generation sharing an identical letter in their names—and was given the circulating letter, San, as I was, in my name, Sanyou. But why name your child Sanho, the coral reef that had been slowly bleached of life and disappeared along with much of the forest on land in the last decades? I finally take in a full view of my cousin’s face. This is the first time we see each other in person, and here she is, my only cousin as far as I know, who looks familiar, maybe too familiar, even for a cousin by blood.

“’K, and you can call me Sanyou.” I carefully look her in the eye, and after a moment of hesitation, ask, “Why do you have a bunk bed?”

Sanho explains her parents are big fans of antiques. Which is to say, she admits, they embrace free things. The bunk bed was the only usable second-hand bed they could find for her, but it turns out, she actually likes having more than one option (“it’s like having a summer house,” she says). I sense Sanho’s not telling me the whole truth, but I don't press her. Instead, I tell her the idea of some people having slept in the bed before appeals to me, because every night we’ll be resting our heads where theirs must have. And if sharing one country gives us the same nationality, and sharing one house makes people families—although my cousin points out, not always—then sharing one bed across time should probably make people something of an even more intimate nature. Sanho takes a moment to digest this, and asks, “Isn’t that a bit creepy?”

But kind of cool, we agree.

That first night, I find myself turning in the upper bunk. I’ve never had a single night in my life falling so dead silent; at night, Seoul hums with distant noises, softly but incessantly, and never goes entirely mute as Chorip-si. It doesn’t help endear the city to me. I keep wondering where Mother could be at the moment. I imagine her checking in at a hospital, an illness eating away at her, which she has to conceal for some reason. I imagine her taking a late-night walk on a beach. I imagine her on an airplane heading somewhere far away, never to return. With a suppressed sigh, I turn to face the wall.

“Don’t wallow in self pity.”

I roll over to look down on Sanho, but I can’t make out her face, let alone her bunk. Lying back in my bunk, I wait for Sanho to say something more, but I don’t hear anything but the rustling of sheets, amplified in the quiet. Suddenly it occurs to me that the rustling sounds too much like those crinkly pillows filled with stubs of plastic straws. It’s one of the things that a place like Chorip-si does to you. Sharpens your senses, tunes you in acutely to your intuition. I squeeze my eyes shut. And in the dark, in that unfamiliar, suffocating quiet, Sanho starts to hum. Like a tiniest night bird. Like a steamboat leaving some faraway shore.

It takes me three days to finally meet Auntie’s husband, who doesn’t seem to stick around much. The first time we meet, Auntie’s husband asks me a few questions: when I want to start school, how well I did in my old school. I want to start right away, I say, I’m afraid I’m an average student, and he nods with polite satisfaction, and that’s it. We never have another one-on-one conversation after. He has lobster eyes that dart around when he speaks and gnarled knuckles that move like piano hammers whenever he lifts his chopsticks. He sings some old, wail-like trot while taking a shower in the only bathroom. Otherwise the family remains voiceless, Sanho tiptoeing about as if carrying on a secret mission, and more often than not, Auntie with her back on us. Once in a while Auntie barks something, but falls silent as soon as a noncommittal apology is offered. All day, they barely talk to each other, and when they do, it looks forced. I can’t help asking myself who’s that polite with their family. But I hold my tongue.

I soon learn there aren’t many people living in the vicinity. Across an unpaved road that threads through the apartment complex and swerves southward, there is a block of luxurious townhouses. This is one of the few residence complexes finished to the final polish. A lofty steel fence, yards and yards of it, sequesters this block from the rest of the neighborhood. But it’s not hard to guess no one lives there. The driveway gate stays resolutely shut, day and night. The block was supposedly to accommodate some of the people in charge of the Chorip-si Project who planned to move in before everybody else, but scrapped that plan once the project showed unmistakable signs of failure.

Mother’s always liked to tell me, in her usual rant about the city, how ridiculously expensive everything is in Chorip-si, except for housing, which cost nothing. “Nothing,” she’d emphasize, “sometimes literally.”

“You can just pick out a house and put up a flag and call it yours,” is exactly how she put it. And she’d go on to complain how much we have to pay for some decent view in Seoul, some extra leg room. Whenever I see the townhouses just across the road, I wonder why Auntie chose the apartment over such fancy houses, if housing was so cheap in Chorip-si. Maybe Mother was mistaken, but I don’t have the gall to ask. “It’s one of the questions you must never ask,” Mother’s always warned, “especially when you’re the younger one.” Not that I ever understood why Mother, who argues so strongly against all money questions, always discusses money with so much passion. Of course, though, that too is a question I’m not supposed to ask.

During the first weeks in Chorip-si, I make it my habit to spy outside from the veranda, where I have a pretty good view of the townhouses across the street. Sanho always runs out alone and spends time somewhere outside after school lets out. With the only computer available being a six-year-old desktop that makes guttural sounds the moment I turn it on, I resort to this passive form of sightseeing, my cell phone close by, even though signal’s staggering at best in Chorip-si. With the phone being so unreliable, I think, I’d better stay ready for Mother’s unannounced return.

By the second week, I know the layout of the townhouses like the back of my hand. Houses are paired up in twos or threes. The overall architecture adopts some vague European tradition but not accurately or respectfully. A staircase spirals up to each front door, and brick walls have in them spacious, white-trimmed windows instead of verandas; a shell-white stone walkway crosses a small patch of lawn each house sits on. Then there is the garden, in the middle of which a huge, empty fountain stands. As far as I can see, the only residents there are fountain sculptures holding some kind of vase over each other, though I can’t tell for sure from this much distance. So static is the entire stretch of the block, removed from all stirs of life. Until something catches my eye.

Something moving.  A girl about my age.

Next thing I know, I’m up and running out the door. Those seven flights of stairs, which seemed steep and demanding on my very first climb, I run down in no time. The railing shudders and rattles as I sprint, leaning my weight against it at each curve. And the hill I run down as swiftly, kicking up clouds of rusty sand. In a mere three minutes I’m standing at the gate of the townhouses, caked with dirt and sweat, panting between coughs. The gate latched closed as always.

The girl must have found some loopholes in that seemingly impenetrable fortress. There is a slim chance the girl actually lives there, but for the entire week, I haven’t seen anyone enter or exit the property through the gate. I begin a slow walk with the steel fence to my left, searching for a doghole, and at the south end, find a steel fence that’s three vertical bars short. Someone my size could have squeezed herself in with ease. But I don’t enter right away. First, I wait.

The first thing I notice, again, is movement. That swaying walk in my direction. The girl’s green dress blends in with the perfectly manicured greeneries—mysteriously so—of all kinds planted across the block. Then I see the girl’s head with disheveled hair, followed by the eyes that widen at the sight of me. The girl pauses in her tracks, though only for a short moment. With an air of believable nonchalance Sanho strides toward me.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to sneak around in there.”

Sanho stops at arm’s length, head tilted to one side. She stands so close I’m able to see flecks of golden freckles shimmering across her face. Suddenly I become aware how toned, lithe she is. How tan she is, in stark contrast to my Seoul friends who cherish their pallid skin. Without visors and sunglasses, they don’t go out in the sun, and when they do, melted sunscreen roams their faces in salty white orbits. On Sanho’s face, there is none but glistening streaks of sweat. She’ll be peeling in a week. She doesn’t seem to care about all that UV radiation of life-whittling levels, or can’t afford to. That very moment, I decide to like her.

Sanho shifts her weight from one leg to another, her cautious eyes on me. She’s the one caught in the act this time, is how I interpret it. She steps closer to the fenceline, her face now shadow-striped behind the bars, intense with an animalistic curiosity. I’m reminded of a zoo, but feel trapped myself, as if I’m the one cooped up, caught in some kind of snare. I have a million questions for Sanho, but I forget everything when she says: “Why don’t you come in?”

Sanho just wanted to get the fountain working, that’s all. She’s been researching on her own how fountains work, but the useless desktop won’t cooperate. Somehow I don’t believe her, but choose not to risk the burgeoning feeling of complicity between us by prying. That day, we come back home on friendly terms, become best friends by the end of the week, and inseparable by the end of that summer.

Every afternoon, the walk up the hill and then the stairs leaves us sweaty and powdered with dust by the time we’re back home from school. The tap water comes out in thin squirty drips, often turning lukewarm and suspiciously milky just a few minutes in, so we always sit on the bathtub rim and share a bucket to wash our feet, our legs touching each other’s. Even when washing my feet, I can’t stand the idea of being separated from my phone, so I hold it flat against the ledge of my bare thigh.

One day Sanho finally snatches away my cell phone. She secures it in her pocket, and as I start to protest, says: “You know keeping this is now pointless.”

She pointedly omits the why, which I can easily guess: your mother doesn’t think staying in touch with you is worth the money. I regret telling her Mother stopped paying for my phone bills. For the first time since Mother left, I feel emotion threatening to take over, my throat contracting. But I’m not about to weep my heart out—an expression Mother likes to use to ridicule emotional women. She used to make a point of telling me, “They’re going to weep their hearts and pride and makeup out, and they’ll even weep their brains out.” I’m going to demand to have my phone back, with a straight face. Sanho can’t expect me to let her push me around like this. Before I can, though, Sanho leans closer and asks me what’s wrong in a rather uncharacteristically kind voice. I manage to say, “There’s no other phone in this house.”

I fail to hold back the reproachful tone directed at her mother. Who the hell, I think, is afraid of phone calls, and what can possibly go wrong with having stable communication with literally the rest of the entire world? “And I don’t think I saw a single payphone booth in this freaking city. I’ve no way to call Mother even if I need to.”

Which means, I think, she won’t even notice if I get murdered one night and tossed in an irrigation ditch somewhere. Back in Seoul, we never seemed to run out of hushed stories of open cases and unsolved first-degree crimes that took place in Chorip-si. My temper is rising by the second.

Then Sanho says: “Aren’t you lucky.”

While I debate if she’s making fun of me, Sanho kicks at my leg in the bucket, drenching my shorts in the left calf. “Think about this. Your mother refused—gave up on, whatever—her responsibility. God knows what good reasons she has, but she’s disqualified all the same. Now she can’t tell you what to do or not. You’re free.”

“Never saw it that way.”

I wiggle my toes and watch the red mud crescents along the cuticles of my toenails wane into the water. Sanho says, “She checked out, you’re in charge. Start thinking for yourself.”

It’s a daring proposal, even if not for a fourteen-year-old, to live on her own terms. But Sanho’s words are just enough to comfort my aching heart in the wake of such a grave betrayal, and let me vent about Mother. Her everything-is-a-lesson attitude, her obsession with money and practicality and composure. Sanho declares, “Your mother’s like Stravinsky without his genius.”

By then I’m not thinking at all about my phone, which, afterward, Sanho will keep insisting has been misplaced. She will point out I can still email her, or we can go ask the Grocer Artist living just around the corner, the only friendly neighbor we know and who owns the only grocery store in the district. I never tell Sanho how relieved I am, in truth, that I no longer have to deal with the compulsion to check my phone, knowingly, in vain.

The only junior high in Chorip-si has no more than twenty six students, and the small group of overenthusiastic teachers has a zero tolerance policy about absence and tardiness and doesn’t relent even when news about floods start to circulate. We soon find ourselves in an odd season of violent rains threatening to turn the desert into quicksand, as if the eroding shoreline keeps pushing in from the southernmost end of the country to swallow Chorip-si and make a headway for Seoul. It’s one of those heavily rainy days, the continuing forecast of floods still largely doubted aloud, that I come down with something.

Sanho begrudgingly finishes her chive cereal and soy milk, and leaves alone for school. I can hear her stomping down the stairs as Auntie tucks me in bed after helping me drink hot tea. As her gangly frame looms over me—her face between the full moons of her breasts—I can see a web of fine lines emerging at the tails of her hooded eyes. I feel a pinprick of sadness, which, as Auntie takes my temperature, turns into something more active: an urge to touch her face. And touch her face, I do. Auntie looks surprised instantly, as if I slapped her across the face. But she lets my hand briefly trace along her cheekbone before guiding it away, which feels like a rare, personal kindness.

I fall asleep not long after. I dream of a giant snake with no fangs trying to suck my head off, while I keep sliding deeper and deeper in its mouth. When I startle awake, covered in night sweats, it’s still early afternoon. I hear faint, repetitive thuds.

Feverish, I struggle to the bathroom where the sounds seem to be coming from, and am soon watching through its door a woman bent over the sink. She’s moving her hands in the sink as if washing delicate fabrics. Her stomach softly thuds against the porcelain every time she leans in, the water adding bizarre splashes now and again. I don’t recognize Auntie at once, with the luxuriant hair of hers gone. I’m looking at the back of her bald head. The scalp seems as if plastered and pulled to the sides where the head meets the ears. Then I lower my eyes and see in the sink full of water something like seaweed, which I decide must be Auntie’s hair (how weird, I think, still dizzy) and which, I suddenly realize, is a wig.

The next moment, Auntie spots me and starts yelling. All of her words pour out jumbled and incomprehensible, in blue streaks. I try to back out, feeling sick to the stomach, and then I’m throwing up hot, acidic stuff all over the floor. There comes a rush of relief, shortly replaced by fear. I kneel on the floor and try to clean up the mess myself, and Auntie sends me back to my room, no longer yelling, and I burst into tears because she looks mortified and I know I’ve done something morbidly wrong. I’m still crying when I finally give in to a headache that exhausts me to sleep. This time I don’t wake up until the evening, and when I do, Sanho’s back home. Auntie sits us down at the table and makes some hot oolong tea.

“It’s good you stayed home today. I got soaking wet,” Sanho says, toweling her hair viciously. The deluge continues to croon against the window panes as we sit in silence. The kettle faintly hisses off steam. Bars of fluorescent light overhead throw a gleaming halo around the crown of Auntie’s luscious hair. As we sip from our cups, Auntie chops green onions and makes a show of preparing dinner. Chasing her halo with my eyes stirs a faint sickness in my stomach. Maybe it’s the stench of the onions. Or the tea, which tastes bitter with a tang, probably from the remaining bile in my mouth.

Less than two years later, when I hear the news of Auntie’s death, I’ll taste that bitterness on my tongue, and think how that day, I swallowed every mouthful of the tea, and how Sanho also emptied her cup, face deadpan, and that it was probably the pettiest thing like that—a moment of unquestioning complicity—that brought me and my cousin that close in such a short summer.

Sitting across from Sanho, I wonder if she knows about the wig, or rather, if she knows why Auntie wears one. I want to ask Sanho about it, but I’m afraid if I did, somehow Auntie would find out and kick me out. No, I don’t actually believe she’d kick me out. Then I think, after all, you never know.

Even after a notable influx of new residents a few years ago, which Auntie’s always referring to as evidence for her optimistic view on property value, Chorip-si has remained empty, and been getting emptier since the news of the flood. But Sanho doesn’t seem to mind, with the entire city ours to explore. And honestly, I don’t, either. Mother’s always told me to tame my tongue and watch my manners in fear of people; in this world where the last of the human race all live side by side, practically atop each other, it’s the survival of the fit-in, not the fittest. Careful now, Mother would whisper, her fingers tightening their grip on my shoulder whenever I slipped. In Seoul, the eyes of people were the ultimate phobia I had to constantly wrestle with: what are they looking at, what are they thinking, what have I done wrong? And Chorip-si, nothing if not empty, seems to promise to set me free.

With no flood on the horizon, it still keeps raining. Most days our school bus now drops us off in the middle of a flooded dirt road winding up to the school, and we sometimes have to walk right into the muddy pools that come up to our knees to get to class on time. One such day, as usual, Sanho and I walk along the road whose both shoulders have turned into muddy streams. The streams, as it turns out, are not empty. Dozens of pond skaters skid across the surface. I’ve never seen pond skaters before Chorip-si, or much wildlife, at that. It’s hard to understand how these seemingly helpless insects thrive in a world where a lot of the most fearful predators have long gone extinct. They are so delicate that I might as well mistake them for raindrops if it were still raining. Under the surface, in the murky water, are also flickers of dark, small things the shape of commas.

“Let’s catch some tadpoles,” Sanho says.

I am about to ask what we’re going to do with tadpoles—does she want to raise frogs?—but then I understand as Sanho takes off her sneakers. We’re going to empty our water bottles, walk into these streams that for sure won’t be here for long, and catch those tadpoles, because they are here, now, trapped in the waters, for who knows how long.

Tomorrow, we’ll have to explain our absence to Teacher Woo, and however good our excuses, she’ll strike our hands with that infamous bamboo flute of hers. The musical instrument is supposed to signify not the punishment but the meaning of it, but we all know it’s just that the sturdiness of bamboo comes in handy, and that she feels carrying a flute, rather than something more cumbersome, spares her some dignity. Sanho and I will hold our hands out, palms up, while she lands ten exacting blows, as always. We’ll let on just as much as expected: some grimaces of pain with a touch of guilty conscience, a ruse students all partake in for everyone’s sake, since the blows otherwise will grow harder next time. Teacher Woo will then say, “This is to teach you a lesson on the importance of diligence and discipline.” But we all know she just prefers a class of eleven—already too small to keep up the appearances—to a class of nine. Nevertheless, she won’t be able to call Auntie, who’s averse to phones of all kinds.

We spend hours in those streams. We’re first careful not to dirty our school uniforms—the waists of the skirts unbuttoned and pulled up to the armpits—but the skirts keep inching down, and by the time we almost fill up our water bottles with tadpoles, there’s no doubt Auntie will take one look and see what we’ve been up to. Sanho looks as if she’s just stepped out of the sewer, and I’m sure we smell, too. Somewhere amidst all the splashes and clumsy swings of hands, one of us says, “Damn those amphibians.” Then we start laughing, me thinking how Mother would look if she saw me right now, and thank goodness, in a bit, rain comes roaring down again, washing away all there is to hide.

World History is the single most important subject on the graduation exam before high school, but I’ve never been good with memorization. So I spend the last few days of summer with my nose buried in textbooks and dreading the fast-approaching September when I’ll be taking the test. Our summer break is scattered across the six scalding months from March onward, one week at a time, and I’m resolute to make the best of this last week I have left. I read over and over about the Era of Delusion and how it came to an end in various forms of global implosion when the size of the human population exceeded even the least conservative prediction.

Humanity’s collective delusion met an abrupt end when it became all too apparent—all too late to change the next sequence of events—that the artificial, technological solutions anyone came up with begot a whole new set of different problems, and even when they managed to solve some of the existing problems, a growing list of side effects. Then came the Great Starvation, during which the entire human civilization faced the worst food inequality in history and had to grapple with the idea of having so much food on the numerical scale, and yet so little, at the same time, that didn’t lead to gradual malnutrition or serious health conditions down the road. Then the world broke into a war, as it does when too many of its members become aware of the uneven distribution of limited resources, or even worse, when they realize there’s no way to make it even without getting rid of some of the competition. I remember thinking how foolish the pre-Deflation generation was, to have missed all the signs even after two World Wars, not knowing that in the thick of a brewing disaster, it’s harder to see how all the different elements across the world are playing into the big picture of an imminent disaster, especially when there are too many trying to hide some of the pieces, not to mention too many willfully overlooking them. I remember all this, despite World History having always been one of my weakest subjects, because of what happens next, as I’m repeating important dates of Deflation under my breath.

I hear noises from outside my bedroom, which, at first, I ignore. But the noises don’t die down as they usually do. Something doesn’t sit right with me. Finally I take a cautious peek outside the room, just as Auntie lets out an angry bark, and barely catch the sight of Sanho slamming the door behind her as she storms out the apartment. I debate following her right away, but I hesitate to leave Auntie alone, whose chest is heaving with anger, her sleek hair slightly lopsided on her head. I remember the feel of her softened cheek at my fingertips that night when I was feverish and feeling alone. It’s the first sunny afternoon in a month of incessant pouring, and I smell the underbelly of the apartment where we’ve been holed up together for the last month, even the damp glue underneath the peeling wallpapers. As Auntie stands there trying to collect herself, I linger nearby. At long last, she gives me a gentle look, and says she’s sorry she disturbed me, it’s nothing.

I know it's no use trying to find my cousin who won’t stick around in the neighborhood. With a shrug, I get back to the history textbooks, and when the flash flood finally comes, that day, taking everyone by surprise despite all the forecast, despite all the rains, I’m reading about the Last War: just as with some of the most all-affecting catastrophes in the past, experts had been divided about the exact way the war would unravel right up to the first major military confrontation on an international scale; some even remained positive that the war would not grow into a global level, until it became clear to everyone that it already was.

Flash floods transform deserts, and in Chorip-si I witness for the first time how. I’ve seen in a few documentaries how water creeps up and overtakes the land, but haven’t realized that those clips were played in slow motion to capture details of the phenomenon. It leaves you at a loss for words to watch a flash flood face to face, water grasping every inch of land at its full speed, and to find yourself living in the middle of its happening. A flash flood doesn’t creep inland by stealth. It races in, it pours in, it charges in like an aquatic beast, to the land, and shoves everything out of its way.

Located just off the border between the city and the desert, Auntie’s apartment sits right in the middle of its path, and that day, from up in Auntie’s apartment, I stand transfixed by the flash flood that looks like a spectacular optical trick of nature. It pains me to admit it, but in this moment of pure awe, I completely forget about my cousin. I lean out from the veranda to see the desert succumb to the flood. The advancing water scares me just enough to keep watching.

After the first onrush, the water briefly ceases to advance and things settle down. Most components of the arid landscape—rocks and sand dunes and spiky plants—have given way to a transient lake. Its beauty, or its sheer unexpectedness, makes me weak in the knees, and I sit on the cold linoleum floor of the veranda. I know, even in my inexperience, that the desert is too immense a place to be held captive, however partially, for long. But the lake glows in an ineffable shade of murky green, and I sit watching—my hips going numb—before I hear the rumble of the second onrush.

The complexity of the past is that everything stays in the present tense in your head—the more haunting, the more present. The narrative is also often in second person, because you’re now an observant bystander, with much hindsight, maybe too much of it, in that overplayed plot you cannot change.

In the decade following Sanho’s disappearance, I’ll make such an odd acquaintance with my own past, with those summer months with Sanho in Chorip-si, and call out to my younger self over and over, frustrated, angry, always utterly helpless. Follow her out, I’ll say. No, you idiot, stop her, I’ll say. Still the past grows blurry with a ruthless speed from the dead center of its backdrop—our bunk bed, the daily route our school bus took, the meals Auntie made for us, and Sanho’s face, the very face that often took us aback when we stood side by side in front of the bathroom mirror on a busy morning, that made me wonder about things I didn’t dare say out loud.

In my head, Sanho’s always just stepping out the door. I’m still watching the flash flood push in and swirl around the small continent of the townhouses that lie safely on the high ground. Auntie and I are calm, until the second onrush of water. I’m still watching, terrified, the water break into the townhouse block, seconds before swallowing every inch of it. Then we’re waiting, days on end, for some news. I’m still standing among the neighbors and teachers who have volunteered to canvass the neighborhood once the flood’s drained. I’m shoving my hand in the rip of the sofa to see if the bills are gone, which will mean Sanho might be on her way to Seoul, as she liked to say she would, the first chance she gets. I’m ripping the leather off the arm of the sofa to make sure. I’m learning, with the bills gone, that hope is far from mercy under the circumstance of an inexplicable loss. I’m still forcing myself through the dark months afterward in Auntie’s apartment, wishing I was the one that disappeared that day. I’m still spending those colder months breaking into and investigating each townhouse, in search of Sanho’s traces. I’m still about to walk into one of the last, where, on the second floor, I’ll stumble upon a bedroom full of potted poppies that had turned a wilted black, where I find a photo album and my cell phone stashed in a canvas bag. I’m still flipping through the photo album and looking at the pictures of Sanho and a girl her age, who looks almost like her identical twin, whose name, I learn from the back of one of the pictures, is Sanyou. I’m still typing in a long, angry message on a messenger app on my phone to Mother demanding to go back home, I don’t care, wherever she’s staying at the moment, chasing the feeble wifi around Auntie’s apartment. I’m still piecing two and two together, or trying not to—trying not to wonder aloud all the questions: why do we live on the eighth floor in a building without a working elevator or other tenants, are all the units below us really empty, where do Auntie or her husband work in this city full only of disgruntled, unmotivated government workers, where did Sanho get all the cash she could hide in the sofa, why did no one tell me about the girl in the photo, who obviously was the previous owner of the upper bunk? I’m still hissing at Mother who manages to show up before the end of year, and I’m still crying quietly in the passenger seat as Mother’s new, shabby car puts distance between us and the city, with my backpack tightly clutched to my chest. And I’m still ignoring Mother’s voice telling me, an endless stretch of eroded highway unfurling before us like a nightmare, about her childhood memory: a coral necklace that was the last heirloom left in the family, how she couldn’t believe it was once a live ocean creature and how she cried when she lost it. I’m realizing, for the first time, why Mother might have decided to change my one-letter birth name, San, to Sanyou. In my head, I’m still looking back at the faraway city from the car while Mother stares ahead telling this story, her left cheek slightly wet, and wondering if I’m leaving Sanho behind, or heading straight towards her; towards Seoul, where I’ll be waiting to run into her, as my face slowly loses the last of my Chorip-si tan, as the world continues to come undone bits by bits, species by species, one ghost city after another, where, as Seoul grows emptier as does the rest of the world, I’ll still wait for the moment, so I can finally ask her, have we arrived, are we home?

I often imagine an alternative end to that summer, and like to think how we would have spent the winter, had she not been so abruptly torn from my life. I like to think we would have done something reckless, but I always end up returning to something ordinary, something so real that it feels, only if I imagine it often and long enough, it’ll become an indisputable part of the real past I lived through. After all, who’s left to say I remember it all wrong?

One bright morning in December, Sanho and I took out sledges from under our bed and went out for a ride; the temperature had plummeted, but without gracing us a single day of snow. But we decided to enjoy some winter sports with or without snow.

Less than a mile from our apartment complex stood a row of modest slopes of sand, perfect for sledding. They were the beginning of the expanse beyond, where sand dunes grew higher and higher until they resembled mountains. Or so I always imagined. Beyond, I imagined, a new world would enlarge out of reach, with so much possibility that we wouldn’t even know where to begin. Or so I always hoped.

As soon as we walked outside, gusts of wind ferociously lapped at us. We walked most of the mile in silence, heads down, tails of our mufflers in tow like nagging thoughts. The only burden we carried was the sledges, which barely outweighed the jackets we had on. Just a mile in, the desert hardly compared with what lay further ahead. All the same, we were meandering onto the brink of something enormous. That knowledge alone made us feel out of breath.

We were at that age, fast as we were passing through it.

We took everything seriously, blew things out of proportion, as if to match our own bodies expanding out of our control, as if anything not in sync with our own uncontrollability couldn’t make sense. Every moment became a grandiose adventure in retrospect. The distant echo of Seoul was a clarion call, and the desert, our new, albeit already crumbling, empire. But what wasn’t crumbling in our world? What wasn’t to crumble, after all, of this world?

In the shunned ghost city, Sanho and I clung to each other as if to the last of our clan. We allowed our inflated feelings to blot out all our unspeakable fear. We let ourselves forget what a disaster our world was becoming, its slow unraveling that was going to leave each and every one of us utterly alone, and how little, so very little, we could do for each other. We never knew it—perhaps, only occasionally felt it in passing, like the foreboding of a hereditary disease—but we were, in fact, going to be the last of our clan, more as a natural course of an ending world than by choice, though it made little difference. Still, it was a wondrous trick–and how many before us, how many apart from us, survived off the mere effect of it?–the insignificant fact of having each other.

In Chorip-si, we always walked as if we were being chased, as if it was the city, the desert, that threatened us. We constantly looked behind our shoulders. Our empire teemed with unknown dangers, sure, mostly biting ants and thorny vegetation, but scorpions and sandstorms seethed too far off to ever touch us. And in the city emptier by the day, there was not a lot that could truly hurt us, unless we walked right into it. And while deep down we knew all this, and much more than we ever let on or spoke of, all of that did not change a thing.

After all, we were at that age.