Liv steps inside to make a last inspection with her pen and pad at ready, as she wants to make sure there’s nothing left to do. I tell her I’ll stay out here. I’m sure there is an important detail left, though I would never see it, as I would never think to order a half-dozen bouquets for around the house, and even rent lead crystal vases to place them in, as Liv has done. Each day up to now has seemed to me a kind of ritualized processional, this step-by-step advance to some defining ceremony, like a wedding or a funeral. But whether it will be a commencement for me or else a last crucible, I do not know.
For my plans, to be true, are nonexistent yet. At least those for me. I’ve instructed Liv to bring all her selling acumen and brinkmanship to bear on this, as I need every last dollar to carry through my other aims. After the sale and closing I’ll call Mr. Finch at the bank and instruct him to buy out Mr. Hickey’s mortgage on the vacant store and building. I’ll ask him to stop the foreclosure, then state any extra price the bank might want for selling the property back to me. Then I’ll call my acquaintances at the hospital billing office and issue an anonymous line of funds for Patrick Hickey, so that he might remain in the PICU for however many days he can hold on and wait.
Concerning Sunny, who didn’t protest that I was selling the house but did ask quite worriedly and sweetly if I were going to move very far away, I’ll place her name on the legal title to the store and building along with mine, and ask if she’ll accept this one thing from me, if she’ll sell the remaining medical stock and inventory and open whatever shop she wants and — if she and Thomas please — come live in the apartments above, which Liv’s contractors are presently reconfiguring and remodeling into one.
And with what remains, if Liv is right and all goes well, I’ll have just enough to go away from here and live out modestly the rest of my unappointed days. Perhaps I’ll travel to where Sunny wouldn’t go, to the south and west and maybe farther still, across the oceans, to land on former shores. But I think it won’t be any kind of pilgrimage. I won’t be seeking out my destiny or fate. I won’t attempt to find comfort in the visage of a creator or the forgiving dead.
Let me simply bear my flesh, and blood, and bones. I will fly a flag. Tomorrow, when this house is alive and full, I will be outside looking in. I will be already on a walk someplace, in this town or the next or one five thousand miles away. I will circle round and arrive again. Come almost home.
~ ~ ~
While writing this novel, I was fortunate to meet with a number of people whose help was invaluable. I would like to thank Prof. Yun Chung Ok, the Rev. Kwon Hee Soon, and Kwon Hyuk Ju of KBS-TV in Seoul. Also, for her help in contacting surviving comfort women and for her translations during our interviews in Seoul, I wish to thank Son Hi-Joo.
About the Author
Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest novel, On Such a Full Sea, will be published in January 2014. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Lee teaches writing at Princeton University.