Suki Kim - The Interpreter

Yet here she sits still, listening to the radiator tap again, as it always does at this hour, an ambulance siren, a train engine, an evenly paced knock that will not stop, which she has gotten used to through the years, which comforts her on winter nights, as though its hissing noise were the only sign familiar to her, the closest thing to a home. The heat comes on slowly, and she is no longer sure if it is Michael she craves or the kind of warmth only another body can offer, the embrace afterward as his hands curl into her arms, as his breath caresses her neck, as his thighs are wrapped into her own. It is sleep she wants, perhaps, the sleep of a spent body, sleep buried in the body of another who’s been so close, who’s entered so far, who’s moved back and forth with such insistence, emptying her of anything she might still remember.

Of course, Michael never holds her like that. He always rushes off afterward, to a meeting, to an airport, to his family. On the rare occasions when he dozes next to her, he will kiss her once with a note of finality, then turn to the wall and be fast asleep. Theirs is not that kind of intimacy. She knows that it would be false for them to cling to each other afterward. She knows that she would leave him if he ever reached out that way. She knows this because she lies next to him recalling another’s hands, which had held her afterward, which had stroked her face so precisely, as though making sure that her eyes were closed now, that her lips were smiling with the sated ripple of what had just occurred, and her fingers still following his as if reluctant to let him go, as if her body had finally found the right angle, the right corner where it might rest until she would awake again and again find him whose hands had held her no matter how often she tried to leave, how far she ran, as far as this 4 a.m. apartment where she sits alone with a dying cigarette, wanting Michael instead, wanting Michael again and again, as though dispelling the dream of another’s hands.

Four a.m. is a haunted hour. Suzy, come back to bed , Damian would plead upon finding her on the porch. She often did that then too. She would awake at this exact hour and retreat so easily into where Damian could not enter. He hated it. He hated seeing Suzy lost in what he dismissed as a “purgatorial suspension of guilt,” for neither he nor she should suffer for what they had to do. Suzy, I need you back in my bed . He claimed her, the way she sought him above anything else in the world, above her parents, her college, her youth, and it was this desperate claim that made her feel uneasy, almost doomed. Suzy, enough . He was never afraid to say what he wanted. He was fearless. Most of all, he was fearless with her, which she thought could only be love.

The same unending night, the same uncertain hour in which Suzy sat in the wicker chair on Damian’s porch many years ago, afraid of the ghosts who were living then, who had such short lives left before them, who have now returned as though they’ve been waiting inside her all day, watching her along the Montauk shore, riding beside her on the Long Island Rail Road, fighting through the evening crowd of Penn Station, hailing a cab to downtown, following her up the steps back to her apartment, and finally settling into this repose where nothing seems familiar except their darling daughter and a bouquet of white irises.

Suzy climbs between cold sheets, back in her futon, which floats like a tiny boat burying her inside the room. Is this what Grace sought? Out there in the sea? A burial for her who cannot swim?

Two shots only; the gun had fired exactly twice and pierced their hearts.

What happens when a bullet pierces a heart? What happens in that eternal second? What happens to a body falling so instantly, as a perfect answer to a perfect finger that pulled the trigger as if counting one, two, first the man, then the wife, or the woman, then the husband, whichever order, for it is all the same who goes first, they will fall together, the bullet never misses, a clean shot, two clean shots, no messy stuff, no pool of blood, no heart-wrenching cries, no crying daughter whose body lies five years later still hoping for the third bullet, which was surely fired, which will reach her heart with dead certainty, as it did once, twice, so easily, so conclusively, two shots only, exactly twice, and how Detective Lester turned to Suzy afterward with a sorry face and informed her, “Miss, your parents died instantly,” as if to say, Miss, your bullet is on the way; miss, be patient, your time will come; miss, we’re sure of it, whoever never misses, whoever is a professional, the shot is a sure thing.

The silence is deceiving. The hissing of the radiator has stopped. The night is a perfect calm. Soon the dawn will break. Already there is a faint light smudging the black sky. Already the next day is a possibility. She thinks she hears the shrill of the phone, the rings, the four desperate rings, though she cannot be sure, though she must be dreaming, this must be the hour when no one calls, no one listens, except for her who follows the sea in piercing rain, who craves a warm body despite love, who lies in the dark pretending to live.

“THIS IS THE INTERPRETER HOTLINE SERVICES for the Korean interpreter Suzy Park. Client, Bronx DA’s Office at the Criminal Court on 215 East 161st Street. Time, twelve-thirty p.m. tomorrow. Take Number 4 to 161st Street. Call back in one hour if there’s a scheduling conflict.”

The message on the machine sounds as if it belongs to one of those computerized answering services. The details vary, but the voice is always the same. Suzy has never met the one giving orders. She was hired over the phone after a forty-minute mock trial in Korean. She sent them the signed freelancer’s contract and began working immediately. The procedure is always the same. They tell her where to go, and she shows up at the designated location. After each job, she faxes them the details of the case, including the file number and the contact information of the attorneys and witnesses present at the deposition, and they send her a check every two weeks. Unlike a fact-checking job, which can last through nights, depositions are over in just a few hours—longer if the case involves a serious medical-malpractice suit, for which both the doctor and the hospital dispatch their individual lawyers, whose redundant questionings can make the whole thing tedious. Then there are the occasional cases where an interpreter is hired as part of a legal strategy even though the witness speaks English. When such a witness is caught lying, he can always point a finger at the interpreter and claim that it is she who translated incorrectly. Or the witness might double-talk and confuse the interpreter, thus making the testimony impossible to translate. These types of depositions can drag on for days, at which point it is no longer the truth the interpreter delivers but a game of greed, in which she has become a pawn. Luckily, such cases are rare, and almost always she walks out of a job within an hour or two.

At first, the agency recommended that Suzy get a beeper or a cellular phone, but she told them that it would be unnecessary. She was always home, she admitted to a mere voice, a stranger with a tab on her life. The message was left yesterday. While Suzy walked along the shore in Montauk, the subpoena was drawn, the witness summoned, the investigation scheduled. A little after midday, an odd time to start a job.

The machine is still blinking. The second message is from Michael. He groans about his dump of a hotel in Frankfurt, the food is glorified grub, and there’re too many Germans everywhere. It is Michael’s way of filling up the silence. When he cannot think of anything else to say, he complains. It is easy to find a man endearing when one’s heart is not at stake. “I’ll call you tomorrow, around four p.m. your time, after my meeting. Be home.” Michael always volunteers his exact whereabouts to Suzy, as though he is afraid of disappearing between the airport runways somewhere in the world. He might do that with his wife also, and she might never suspect him. Suzy has no idea what he tells his wife on those nights he stays at the Waldorf. Suzy never asks. It is an unspoken rule. She imagines Michael to be a good husband and father. He probably arrives at the front door of his Westport home with an armful of presents each time. On his wife’s dressing table is surely an array of duty-free perfume bottles in every color and shape. She probably laughs and tells him to stop, a cute joke between the two, she refusing to wear the airline-sponsored scent and he promising never to buy another, and then, upon reaching home after a whirlwind of flights, with a cheeky smile, he takes out another crystal bottle from his coat pocket. The baby, now almost a year old, is on the lap of their nanny while the handsome couple in their late thirties kiss.