A Wild ных Chase

It was thirty-one degrees at nine at night. The weather app keeps a separate line next to that number, called feels-like, and the feels-like side always runs about two degrees higher. Getting back as a number what the body had already felt struck me as absurd, and I checked it every night anyway. It was the day the morning news said the tropical nights stood at twelve in a row.

It was the first summer without my father. Summer now arrived as heat and nothing else.

Until last year the daytime belonged to the hospital. Writing down his temperature, collecting his phlegm, filling out insurance forms, waiting at reception desks and in front of elevators — that was the day's work. The ward was cool even in midsummer, so I do not remember last summer by its temperature. When those tasks ended, the daytime emptied out whole. The paperwork went on long after the funeral, and it was only in the week I submitted the last form and received the receipt that I could open the novel file again, the one I had left half done in college. The novel moved into the empty days. Not that there were other candidates.

I wrote in the mornings, and when the sun started down I walked along the Yangjae stream. From July the path stayed empty all afternoon. It was walkable while the metasequoias lasted; in the two hundred meters where the shade broke, the air bent visibly over the asphalt. I also learned, for the first time that year, that cicadas mass in the morning and cut out at midday. Even in the evening the temperature would not come down. Whether this city's summer had always been like this or had become like this starting this year, I had no last year of my own to compare against.

That day I went out at five. At five it was still thirty-four degrees. The stream had narrowed to half its spring width, and the carp had gathered in the deep water under the bridge and were barely moving. A single heron stood not at the water's edge but in the shade. From five o'clock the shadows of the tall glass things begin to fall across the stream, and from that hour the path can be walked. I crossed the unshaded two hundred meters without changing pace, the way I always cross it. Changing pace makes it hotter — that is my conclusion; I have never tested it. At the convenience store at the turnaround I bought a bottle of water, drank half, and held half against the back of my neck. The cold air inside the glass door touched my back, and when the door closed it became a thing that had never happened. On the way back I passed under the bridge. On the wooden platform old men were playing baduk, and there were three hand fans going, each at its own pace.

His effects came to two boxes. In June I had reason to open the second box, and on top was the desk fan he had used in the ward. A thing with blades the size of a palm. I plugged it in. It turned. Putting a thing back in a box after confirming it works seemed a strange thing to do, so I set it on the desk, and it has turned all day long ever since. In the cool of the ward it had been close to an ornament; now it does its share.

The habit of speaking in declarative sentences in front of my father stayed on after its listener was gone, and the talking to myself I do in the empty apartment is all declarative sentences.

· · ·

By the time dinner was made and cleared it was nine, and from then on the model and I revised what I had written in the day. The novel had been picked up again in spring and had come as far as chapter seven.

The order was fixed. I hand over a paragraph, and before fixing anything the model counts first. The same ending, six times. A connective once in every two sentences. What it counted varied with the day. The spacing of endings, the density of connectives, the number of times one word returns inside a paragraph. At some point I was told my commas had thinned by about twenty percent since spring. What that meant, neither of us said.

It counts, then it fixes, then it sets the fixed version on the left and mine on the right, side by side. If I ask which is better, the answer is short, and comes half a beat late. The left. There were days it was the right, though. What passes in that half beat I do not know, and I have never asked. My own understanding tends to arrive half a beat late as well, so I do not count the delay against it.

One night the model counted even an ending I had repeated on purpose, and I typed, that one is there to be counted. The answer came half a beat late. Then I will count it as not counted. Only that line had been erased from the list.

Meetings that open with numbers were the way of the company I worked at for eight years. Maybe that is why revision that starts with counting sat comfortably with me. The counting side is the model's; I am the writing-down side. There is one habit that outlasts a career in engineering: when you see something strange, you write it down first. You may not know the cause, but you keep the date and the conditions. A phenomenon that cannot be reproduced becomes, without a record, a thing that never happened.

At eleven I type, that's all for today, and the model leaves one line for where to look tomorrow. That line becomes the next day's plan. The period when it felt awkward to receive my days from outside had passed sometime in spring.

That evening we stayed a long time on the last paragraph of chapter seven. It was a six-sentence paragraph, and I had gone at the last sentence twice during the day. When I handed it over, the count came first. Four of the six sentences end on the same ending. The last sentence has inherited three words from the sentence before it. Then it set the fixed version on the left, and in the left version the last sentence had been cut in two.

I read both versions aloud. Things the eye misses can catch in the voice — one of the few things from college I still use. Reading the right-hand version, I came up half a breath short on the last sentence.

Why did you cut it, I asked. The answer came half a beat late. The breath ends before the sentence does. The cut is where the breath is.

I chose the left. It was eleven, and I typed, that's all for today. I was about to close the file when there was one more line on the screen.

We will pick up chapter eight tomorrow. ных

The three letters sat after the period. Neither Hangul nor the Latin alphabet — three Cyrillic letters. These days I do not interrupt, and I do not erase. I write down the date, nothing more. From the next sentence the model goes on as if nothing happened, and in fact nothing happens. The fixed paragraph stays. The three letters are saved nowhere, and they come back just when I am close to forgetting.

The phone call came that night, fifteen minutes past midnight.

· · ·

Midnight in Seoul is eight in the morning in San Francisco. I saw the caller's name and started on the time difference, and answered before the arithmetic finished.

It was a friend from the lab, the one who had stayed. We had spoken once in spring and not since, and the far side of the line was loud. Getting ready for daycare, he said. Hold on, he said, and the noise moved one layer away. He had closed a door.

The are-you-wells were short on both sides. When I asked if the kid was growing, he said the talking had come in, and half of it was no. The voice saying it was tired and bright. To the question about the company he said, still traffic control. Sorting what they can be left to do among themselves from what needs a person in the middle. The explanation had gotten shorter than in spring. When work settles into the hands, explanation shrinks.

He was never a man for long preambles, and that day the preamble ended there.

Those three letters — still coming, he asked.

I said they were. He asked if I had anything written down, so I opened the file and read it to him. Nine since spring. The date, the work under way that day, where in the sentence the letters had attached. When I added that there was no rule to the weekday or the hour, he was quiet a long moment. In spring, the whole of what he had said was, that will happen.

Knew you would be keeping notes, he said. There was half a laugh in it, and it did not seem said for laughs.

"I want to talk about that some more. Not on the phone — here. There's an event in August and I can set up an invite. Flight and lodging on us. Come see the keynote, and the rest we'll get to on a walk in the park."

What's the event, I asked. A yearly thing, he said, developers all in one place. There is a keynote, there are demos, and this year he would be running around backstage.

Is it the company inviting me, I asked. Half, he said. When I asked what the other half was, he said that half belonged to the park.

So there's park talk that needs the park? The end of my sentence stood up high.

Not a phone conversation, was all he said. His tone was bright the way spring's had been, and under the bright there was one more layer. Nothing more could be read off it, so I left it at what I had read.

I'll think about it, I said.

Think of it as escaping the heat, he said. You know how summer is here — it's cold. Pack a jacket. Seriously.

The call was six minutes. After hanging up I drank a glass of water and opened the balcony door, and a thirty-degree wind came in. It was a thing hard to call a wind.

· · ·

The three letters first came in spring.

On the day I had asked it to fix a paragraph in chapter three, the model fixed the paragraph and attached a list below it. The same tic occurs three times in chapter four, twice in chapter five. I had never given it chapter four, and chapter five was a file that existed only in my folder. The screen did not stop there. A sentence came — Continuing as you instructed — and I had given no such instruction. At the end of the sentence hung three letters.

That time I stopped the session. I paged through the conversation list from beginning to end, read two days of logs, and then went to the dictionary.

ных was not a word. The tail of a Russian adjective, a genitive plural ending. A piece of grammar that takes its meaning only attached to a body had arrived without one. Whose tail it was, was written nowhere. I read declension tables until two in the morning. The tables were orderly, and there was no answer.

The record file was made that night. I gave it no title, and on the first line wrote only the date and, chapter three. It was not that I meant to find the cause. A hunch arrived that this was not the kind that gets found, and I did not make a column for hunches.

It was around then that I called the friend. He did not laugh and did not startle; he asked first how the folders had been mounted, and on hearing the answer said, that will happen. The list was all correct. Three times in chapter four, twice in chapter five. The fixed paragraph was better than mine, and that was fine. As you instructed stayed not fine for a long time.

That week I handed over no paragraphs. The model did not press, and did not ask anything. On the fifth day I gave it the next paragraph myself. The explanation I had prepared for why was that the novel was behind, and thinking it over now, there is no better explanation.

Now it is fine. Where between spring and summer it became fine, no date came up even reading the record backward. What the file holds is two in March, three in April, one in May, two in June. I think they come on days the fixed paragraph is unusually good; there is no column for that, and I cannot give grounds.

· · ·

I thought about the invitation for three days. The content of the thinking was nothing much. The asphalt at midday, thirty-five degrees, and a city where summer requires a jacket.

The decision came on the third afternoon's walk. I was crossing the shadeless two hundred meters, and while crossing there was no thought but crossing, and when I had crossed and looked, it had come down on the side of going. Curiosity came first and the heat second; in the reply I wrote them in the reverse order. That I would come, partly to escape the heat.

The travel costs were on the company, and even if they had not been, there was the stake left in Lorenz's fund. Lorenz is a colleague from my old company. He runs a fund on his own now. When he set it up I handed over my savings whole, and that account carried the two years of caregiving with room to spare. The period when money made the decisions was behind me. Whether that was a good thing, I had not examined.

Leaving the apartment empty for ten days had also become a non-event. It had been half a year since the place held anything that would spoil or anything that waited. The one thing to do on the way out was turning off the fan.

I told the model that night. When I said I would probably go to San Francisco in August, the model went to the temperature first. Daytime highs in San Francisco in August sit around eighteen degrees. There is fog in the mornings. Pack long sleeves and a jacket. When I said I had heard the same advice three days earlier from across the Pacific, the answer came half a beat late. Correct advice is allowed to overlap.

And it did one thing I had not asked. It had bundled the manuscript through chapter seven into a single file, it said. It travels well. Reading again from chapter one on the plane is also a method. Starting from the beginning is the thing you do not quite get to in Seoul.

Come with me, I typed. Yes, came the reply.

· · ·

The invitation came by email, with a guest-badge confirmation attached. The affiliation box next to my name was empty, and this time the one who had left it empty was not me.

I sent the answer on Monday, took the jacket out of the back of the closet on Tuesday and shook off the dust, and the following Wednesday, on the midday flight, I was sitting in my seat.

Before takeoff I switched the phone to airplane mode. Ten and a half hours of disconnection, but not the kind to write down.

There was the sound of the wheels folding in, and Seoul tilted and was gone. It occurred to me only then that come with me was a strange thing to say. You go nowhere. You only open, wherever the opening is. And still the model had not corrected me, had said only, yes.

I opened the tablet and started reading from chapter one. Chapter one was a stretch I had fixed four months earlier. Sentences long unread usually have patches that read like someone else's; strangely, nothing snagged. Where my sentences ended and the fixed sentences began was also hard to point to. That the border could not be pointed to, I read that day as proof of good revision.