In the time that Hector had worked in the mall, there had been what seemed to him an extremely high turnover of tenants, none except the restaurant remaining open for very long, and then even the restaurant changed ownership twice in the last few years. Jung had told him that it was because the tenants were often inexperienced business-people, immigrants who got onto a notion of selling some product they could import cheaply and easily, but rarely, it would turn out, cheaply and easily enough to compete with the stores at the large malls nearby. The dentist did reasonably well, as did the bakery, which sold sweet, buttery breads and pastries filled with custards and sweet bean paste the customers couldn’t get anywhere else. But mostly the stores here were poorly planned, overhopeful, hastily opened ventures that were preordained to fail, or, even worse, to fail ever so slowly, in an unremitting, soul-grinding diminishment that was invisible by the hour and the day but by season’s end could be seen in the wilted posture of a store owner as she hand-lettered signs for a clearance table of handbags and scarves. Except for Sang-Mee, the waitress at the restaurant, Hector kept his distance from the tenants so as not to have to deal with their potential difficulties and failures, which might stir up in him an even more insidious disturbance than his suddenly charged empathy, something that he could not so easily drink into oblivion or brawl his way through.
Before the incident with the boy soldier he had been a willing enough soldier in their war. Or maybe not their war exactly, but Mao’s war, or Truman’s, or someone else’s; it was a war that from the beginning had been nobody’s cross, inciting only mild attacks of patriotism and protest, jingoism and pacifism, a war both too cold and too hot and that managed to erase fifty thousand of his kind and over a million of theirs. Hector had enlisted immediately after hostilities broke out and so was among the first to be shipped to Japan before landing in Inchon, among MacArthur’s forces. He was twenty years old and of course carnally educated but knew little of much else. He had a healthy native intelligence but it was never more than lightly worked, due to his patent beauty and his prowess on the playing fields and in schoolyard fisticuffs. If the North Koreans hadn’t invaded their brethren in the South, he would simply have worked at Remington, if not in arms, then in typewriters, adding machines, whatever else. He would have been a husband and a father and played baseball on summer Saturdays with his buddies and inevitably slept with some of their wives, but at least it wouldn’t have been at his invitation, never his initial doing. In his alternate life there would have been the customary troubles, his own wife maybe leaving him and coming back and leaving him again in a serial drama that had as its greatest satisfaction the comfort of familiarity, of reprise, his days played out in a circle no larger than the carry of a human shout. He sometimes wondered what his life would be like for him now, as a middle-aged son of Ilion; by now he’d be drawing a small pension and playing with his grandchildren on the porch of a row house on a street thick with other Brennans and wondering what it would have been like to have ventured out and seen the wider world.
With the war he saw it fully wide and dark and deep. But it wasn’t the usual rough awakening: he’d never been in thrall to the notion of hero. As a soldier he’d pictured himself not a savior, or some killing machine, but rather one of countless figures on the battlefield, just like the toy soldiers he played with all through his youth; each mini-statuette was formed in one of several poses, as either a prone shooter or a bayonet-wielding assaulter or a marcher, Hector seeing himself as the last of these, the ones the other boys didn’t care for and would trade to him at ten to one for the others. He was captivated by the swarm of great numbers, the feel of them bunched in his hands like a massing of tiny bones. On the chipped, painted porch of his parents’ house he’d line them up in neat rows, the marchers, gritty-faced, pushing on, their rifles shouldered, and though many in the front would perish before the shooters and bayonets, he knew their flood would prevail.
Now, as he put the vacuum back in the closet and began filling the rolling bucket, Jung woke up and stood and stretched, yawning wide as a lion before sitting back down. As if he’d slept with a lighter and cigarette in his hand, he instantly lit one up. Hector well knew the pattern of the man’s Saturdays; Jung would play a heavily wagered round at the municipal golf course at Overpeck and then eat and drink and gamble the rest of the night with his playing partners and maybe visit some bar girls at one of the Korean nightclubs in town. In between, when he could get to a phone, he’d bet on football games, baseball games, basketball in the winter. He was in his mid-thirties and married and had young children, but a few weeks ago his wife had kicked him out of their apartment in Palisades Park, fed up with his womanizing and chronic absence and gambling and his unrepentant laziness, which was in fact his core charm. There was an admirable self-comfort in Jung’s manner, like he’d evolved himself so completely that anything but utter acceptance of his ways would be absurd, akin to thinking less of hippos for wallowing in mud, or of flies for seeking dung. Jung never actually worked as a custodian, sub-hiring a day laborer or two off a street corner in Little Ferry to fill in for him; the most he did was light carpentry for the tenants or replace burned-out fluorescent tubes, and of course collect the rent.
“Starting late today, huh, GI?” Jung murmured, checking his fat gold diver’s watch, his eyes squinting against the stream of the smoke.
“Want to know why?”
“What, you have big date last night?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“She fat lady?”
“He.”
“No fucking way,” Jung guffawed, the cigarette tilted down loosely in his mouth. “Don’t tell me this, GI!”
“Relax. He wasn’t there to be nice to me.”
“Oh shit,” Jung said, sitting up in the couch. “You okay? You look okay.”
“I’m all right. But do me a favor. Don’t mess around with this any longer. Pay what you owe. For my sake as well as yours. I might not be around when the next guy comes, and even if I were…”
“Okay,” Jung said, smoking slowly now. “Okay.”
“You don’t have the money, do you?”
“I’ll get it.”
“I hope you win big this weekend, chief.”
“Me too, GI.”
Jung had been calling him GI since learning that Hector had been in the Korean War, or else called him Joe, or Rambo, something else Hector would have never suffered from anyone else but didn’t mind from Jung. In fact he took a small pleasure in the idea that more than thirty years of tumultuous world history should presently lead to a moment like this, for him to be dressed in cheap coveralls, mop in hand, preparing to clean the toilets of a grubby Korean mall in New Jersey for this most slothful of their kind, a man who was, literally, born in a roadside ditch during the war but didn’t remotely know or care a thing about it now.
“But hey, Rambo, you got hot sex last night, too, huh?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Otherwise you’d be real mad at me.”
“I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“See, I’m right,” Jung said, leaning back on the couch. He had already forgotten about his betting debts. “I’m glad. I’m afraid you some homo.”
“Dream on.”
“Maybe, brother. You never know. Maybe I’m sick of women. Sick of all their bullshit. You not?”