Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

Noon. Consciousness and a punishing sun. Woo-jin coughed and spit blood and snot. Was it—gawd, he’d bitten his tongue. A small charter plane rattled across his vision, departing and entering peripheries. He made it up on one elbow. An ant crawled up a nearby stalk of grass and this occupied Woo-jin’s attention for several minutes. His body unpersuasively argued against gravity. He rubbed his eyes and turned around.

There was the dead girl again, lying in the grass exactly as he’d found her the first time. Woo-jin nodded and sat on the big machine.

“This isn’t real,” he said. “I’m just remembering you.” He tossed his Coors can at the body, striking it in the chest. Maybe if he looked away then looked back, she would disappear. Didn’t happen. “Oh well,” he said.

Woo-jin headed homeward, stinking, bloody, incapable of walking a straight line. Semi trucks blasted past, inches away, on the road. One step to the right and he could’ve put an end to this BS. But he wanted something to eat; the café smells of Georgetown tormented him. A couple tourists veered out of his way as he passed them on the sidewalk and in the window of a music store that only sold vinyl he witnessed this haggard, face-fucked-up vision that he thought must be a Halloween mask.

Woo-jin heard the helicopter as he approached his home but couldn’t formulate the thought that it might have anything to do with him. This one wasn’t a cop ’copter. It was a big lifter, like the kind they used for construction on New York Alki. It hovered over the spot of land where the trailer stood, with cables attached to the mobile home’s four corners and a man in a helmet and flight suit standing on the roof. This guy gave a thumbs-up and slowly the trailer creaked and broke free from its moorings.

“Patsy!” Woo-jin cried. He saw parts of her through the various windows, fleshy mounds of arm or back, it was hard to tell. Her face appeared in the window above the kitchen sink. She was not happy.

“You never came back to feed me!” Patsy yelled. “What the Jesus were you doing all night?”

“Patsy, where are they taking you?”

The helicopter rose, the cables strained. Woo-jin sprinted, leaped, and grabbed a dangling portion of the porch.

“You left me to starve to death!” Patsy yelled, her face red, popping out cartoon stress droplets.

Flight suit guy bent down and hollered, “You’re gonna want to let go, son! We’re only going up from here!”

“Where are you taking my sister?” Woo-jin yelled as the two-by-four he had been holding on to groaned with slippy nails and he tumbled ten or so feet to the ground. A flower pot with a dead flower in it thunked him on the head, inducing a swirl of stars and chirping birds. Flight suit guy and Patsy both yelled at him, maybe revealing Patsy’s destination, but over the chopper’s blades and head bonk confusion there was no hearing for Woo-jin. In a great whirl of dust he shut his eyes tight and did his best to cover his mouth. The helicopter headed east, toward the Cascades, trailing the trailer from which Patsy did her best to wave good-bye.

“I shouldn’t have eaten her hamburger,” said Woo-jin. He lay for some time in the dirt, wondering when he’d need to head back to Il Italian Joint for another round of dishwashing. After a time he came to feel he was being watched. Sounded like wind chimes. He opened an eye. Standing nearby was the man from the neighborhood who demanded to be addressed as the Ambassador. None who knew his real name felt compelled to share it. He was just the Ambassador, nearly seven feet tall, hair in tight dreads, wearing the primary colors of an African wardrobe, big dangly cubist earrings, and a fat ring on every finger. His scepter was crafted from a toilet brush duct-taped to the shaft of a plumber’s helper, decorated with pipe cleaners and words of positive reinforcement written in tiny script circumnavigating the handle. He also sported a great white beard and a pair of sunglasses he’d discovered in a ditch.

“Ambassador,” Woo-jin said, “I could use some help.”

“You certainly could,” the Ambassador said, leaving the thought hanging.

“Maybe you can find a helicopter and convince them to follow the guys who just kidnapped my sister and have them yell out their window at the other helicopter to have Patsy throw down some extra pairs of my pants and shirts and stuff.”

“Or I could let you borrow a deluxe sweatpant-and-shirt ensemble,” the Ambassador grinned.

The Ambassador helped Woo-jin to his feet. They stood a moment inside the foundation where the trailer used to be. Sun baked the dusty afternoon air. The Ambassador invited Woo-jin to join him in a constitutional, and as they walked he bore his scepter across his chest. They passed the Denny’s and a do-it-yourself car wash place. A few people bowed as they proceeded, paying the man his respect and casting a wary eye at Woo-jin, whose hairdo looked like it had been barfed up by a cat. They traversed the parking lot of a metal prefabricator and came to the Ambassador’s three-story, mid-twentieth-century home. A freshly painted white fence restrained a postage stamp of a yard resplendent with gerbera daisies, nasturtiums, and great purple gouts of lilacs. The Ambassador unhooked the gate and led the way up the cobbles to the porch, where a gallon jar of sun tea absorbed UV rays. Inside, the Ambassador pointed Woo-jin in the direction of the mud room and adjoining bathroom, and provided a plastic garbage bag for his soiled clothing. This was the fanciest shower Woo-jin had ever seen; to use it he felt he might need an engraved invitation. He stripped down and groaned disgustedly at what he’d done to his undershorts, then climbed into the hot shower and puzzled over the abundance of scented soaps, selecting a bar of artisanal lemongrass-oatmeal soap after some deliberation. As the caked-on dirt slid off his body he recalled the previous night’s vision, the man in the desert with his refrigerator and stuffed animals and full-length mirror. Who was that character? An insane dude somehow invading Woo-jin’s freaked-out mind space on an astral plane? Yeah, probably. Or he could have been something manufactured by Woo-jin’s imagination, though he doubted that, having little confidence in his brain to make up cool things out of the blue.

Then there was the dead girl. Again? She’d showed up again? He wondered if he should get in touch with one of the police officers who’d so kindly given him a glass of milk and told him to get the hell out of there. Or maybe they’d just dumped the body back where they’d found it. Unlikely. They had big storage units for that kind of thing. Or cemeteries.

Woo-jin, clean, found a tracksuit getup outside the bathroom door and slipped into it. The sweatshirt was a zip-up, and both it and the matching pants were a blazing red with white piping. On the left breast of the sweatshirt were embroidered the words “Official Delegate.” At the sink he located a jar of his favorite brand of hair gel and pulled his hair into its usual spikes. With an electric razor he shaved what little stubble he’d generated in the last twenty-four hours. He admired himself in the mirror. He looked like a sex machine. Whatever sex was.

Woo-jin found the Ambassador in his front room, sitting in a ornate, baroque-looking gold and vermilion chair next to a matching love seat. The walls were done up with tastefully muted pinstriped brown wallpaper. The whole place looked official, like it was just waiting for big-time state business to go down. Like some guys in suits would show up and shake hands amid stuttery camera flashes. The Ambassador motioned for Woo-jin to sit. In rolled a room-service cart with two of those silver round tray thingies, pushed by a gaunt waiter-type. As Woo-jin took his seat, the waiter revealed a meal of artichoke and feta lasagna, green salad with sliced pears and an herbed kumquat vinaigrette, garlic-lime mashed potatoes, asparagus, an assortment of rolls, mineral water, a dish of sorbet, and a slice of raspberry cheesecake. Woo-jin about passed out.