Human Acts(14)
The random jumble of bodies, mine included, were jolted along in the truck. Even after I’d lost so much blood that my heart finally stopped, the blood had continued to drain from my body, leaving the skin of my face as thin and transparent as writing paper. How strange, to see my own eyes shuttered in that blood-leached face.
As evening drew in around us, the truck left the built-up districts and raced down a deserted street, surrounded on both sides by darkening fields. It began to ascend a low hill, thickly wooded with tall oaks, then an iron gate swung into view. The truck slowed to a stop in front of the gate, and the two sentries saluted. Two long, sharp shrieks of metal, first when the sentries opened the gate, and again when they closed it behind us. The truck drove a little farther up the hill, turned into a clearing flanked by a low concrete building on one side and the oak wood on the other. It stopped.
They climbed down from the truck, walked around to the back, and undid the catch. Again in pairs, one person to seize the legs and the other to hold the arms, they moved us from the truck to the center of the clearing. My body seemed to slide beneath my wavering grasp, as though trying to shuck me off, but I clung on with a strength born of desperation. I looked up at the low building, the lighted windows. I wanted to know what kind of building it was, where I was, where my body was being taken.
They pushed their way into the thicket, which backed on to the empty lot. Following the gestured instructions of one who looked to be in charge, they stacked the bodies in the neat shape of a cross. Mine was second from the bottom, jammed in tight and crushed still flatter by every body that was piled on top. Even this pressure didn’t squeeze any more blood from my wounds, which could only mean that it had all leaked out already. With my head tipped backward, the shade of the wood turned my face into a pallid ghost of itself, eyes closed and mouth hanging half open. When they threw a straw sack over the body of the man at the very top, the tower of bodies was transformed into the corpse of some enormous, fantastical beast, its dozens of legs splayed out beneath it.
—
After they left, the darkness closed in around us. The faint afterglow that had lingered in the western sky dissolved slowly into the surrounding blackness. I moved quickly up to the top of the tower of bodies, anchoring myself to that final man to watch a pale light seep through wisps of gray cloud, a shroud for the half-moon. The leaves and branches of the thicket intersected that light, their shadows throwing patterns on the dead faces like ghastly tattoos.
It must have been about midnight when I felt it touch me—that breath-soft slip of incorporeal something, that faceless shadow, lacking even language, now, to give it body. I waited for a while in doubt and ignorance, of who it was, of how to communicate with it. No one had ever taught me how to address a person’s soul.
And perhaps, or so it seemed, my companion was equally baffled. Without the familiar bulwark of language, still we sensed, as a physical force, our existence in the mind of the other. When, eventually, I felt him sigh away, his resignation, his abandonment, left me alone again.
The night deepened, became threaded through with a string of similar occurrences. My shadow’s edges became aware of a quiet touch; the presence of another soul. We would lose ourselves in wondering who the other was, without hands, feet, face, tongue, our shadows touching but never quite mingling. Sad flames licking up against a smooth wall of glass, only to wordlessly slide away, outdone by whatever barrier was there. Every time I felt a shadow slip from me, I looked up at the night sky. How I wanted to believe that cloud-wrapped half-moon was watching over me, an eye bright with intelligence—in reality nothing more than a huge, desolate lump of rock, utterly inert.
It was as that strange, vivid night was drawing to a close, as the faint blue light of dawn had begun to seep into the sky’s black ink, that I suddenly thought of you, Dong-ho. Yes, you’d been there with me, that day. Until something like a cold cudgel had suddenly slammed into my side. Until I collapsed like a rag doll. Until my arms flung themselves up in mute alarm, amid the cacophony of footsteps drumming against the tarmac, ear-splitting gunfire. Until I felt the warm spread of my own blood moving up over my shoulder, the back of my neck. Until then, you were with me.
—
The grasshoppers were chirring. Hidden birds began to trill their morning song. Gusts of wind grazed the leaves of dark trees. The pale sun trembled over the lip of the horizon, moving up to the sky’s center in a violent, majestic advance. Piled up behind the thicket, our bodies now began to soften in the sun, with putrefaction setting in. Clouds of gadflies and mayflies alighted on those places that were clotted with dried black blood, rubbed their front legs, crawled about, flew up, then settled again. I pushed out to the edges of my body, wanting to check whether yours was also jammed into the tower somewhere, whether you had been one of those souls whose fleeting caress had swept over me the previous night. But I couldn’t, I was stuck, unable to detach myself from my body, which seemed to have acquired some kind of magnetic force. Unable to look away from my ghost-pale face.
—
Things went on like this until, with the sun almost at its zenith, I knew: you weren’t there.
Not just that you weren’t there, in that pile; you were still alive. For some reason, though the identities of the other souls who were clustered near at hand remained unknown, if I used all my powers of concentration to picture a specific individual, someone I’d known, I was able to tell whether or not they had died. And yet, at that moment, my discovery brought me no comfort. Instead, it frightened me to think that here by this strange thicket, surrounded by bodies gradually breaking down into their constituent parts, I was alone among strangers.