Constellation

CHRISTINA

In Hyehwa, the student district of Seoul, there was a three-story brick apartment building. Christina sat on the short flight of steps at its entrance, her right cheek propped in her hand, an unlit cigarette in her left. The entrance lay in shadow, but the midsummer afternoon was hot.

She thought she saw something skim across the clear blue sky. It was too fast to be a plane. There was no contrail, no sound; it vanished from sight in an instant. Christina kept looking in the direction it had gone. The summer sunlight grew fiercer, heating the entire city. She took a silver lighter from her breast pocket and flicked its lid open and shut with her thumb, without lighting anything. Only the metallic click struck coolly against the concrete.

“That’s right. Under international law, this country is still technically at war.”

Christina stood and lightly brushed the grit from the hem of her white shirt. She forced the lighter and cigarette into the pocket of her black shorts and started walking, tying her shoulder-length blond hair back with an elastic band. Her new black canvas shoes grew dirty as they crushed bits of crumbling concrete underfoot.

She opened an old glass door painted in red with the words LET’S HAVE RAMEN TOGETHER and took the seat nearest the entrance. A small bell above the door announced her arrival. The diner was so small that ten customers would have filled it. The woman who ran the place alone called out, “Long time no see,” but Christina did not understand and could only give her a pleasant, uncertain smile. She looked over the menu written on the wall and ordered the item at the far left, the hottest ramen she had tried so far. Somehow, she understood when the woman warned her, “It’s really spicy.”

“Gwaenchanha—I’m fine,” she replied in the only Korean she had learned.

Even so, the heat soon made her nose run. The ends of her blond hair slipped into the soup and turned bright red. When the woman told her that her hair was in the bowl, Christina did not understand. She merely raised her face with a vacant look. The woman touched her own hair, and at last Christina discovered the red-stained ends of hers. She hurriedly wiped them with a tissue, but when she brought them close to her nose, they still smelled hot and peppery.

“You silly thing,” the woman said with a laugh, and Christina smiled ruefully. She wished that back home there were little Korean diners like this, not only Mongolian restaurants.

When Christina paid, the woman told her to be careful in the heat. Christina could not understand the words, but she sensed the concern in them and said, “Thank you,” in English before leaving.

She returned to the steps of the apartment building, took the bent cigarette from her pocket, and lit it with the silver lighter. She was not waiting for anything. The street was quiet, as though all of time had been compressed into a single midsummer moment. Apart from the city bus that came at regular intervals, almost no cars passed.

Christina drew in a lungful of smoke and let it out again, then lowered her face. At the end of her remaining right hand, the cigarette simply went on burning with a faint hiss. She could not clearly remember when she had come to Seoul. Fragmented memories whose order could be rearranged without limit surfaced and disappeared.

*

The nearly empty flight to Incheon already had its cabin lights dimmed and was moving smoothly through the night. No one shared Christina’s row of three seats. She had reserved the aisle, but she sat by the window and looked outside. The lights of cities suddenly emerging in the darkness were reassuring. Yet when she imagined them eventually swallowed by the dark, they began to look like a last instant of brightness before death, and a sudden loneliness came over her. She felt she had understood, if only dimly, that a city was lonely in itself.

There were still more than five hours to Incheon, but she did not feel like doing anything. Whenever she tried to sleep, memories she had not recalled in a long time rose unbidden, and she found herself longing for the world in which anyone could reach anyone else with ease.

I wonder what happened to Nina after she became a flight attendant, she thought. She couldn’t possibly be serving on this flight, could she?

Christina called a flight attendant over and asked for red wine. A small plastic bottle was placed on the unstable folding tray, which looked ready to snap at any moment. When Christina asked for another, the attendant smiled.

“Of course.”

She handed Christina a second bottle. The badge on her chest read NINA.

“I have a friend called Nina too. She’s a flight attendant as well.”

“I’ve never met another crew member with my name. Is your Nina with Aeroflot too?”

“Probably.”

“We work with different people on almost every flight. If you stay in the job long enough, you sometimes end up on another flight together, but usually it happens only once. When this flight is over, that’s it.”

“Like life.”

“That’s an interesting way to put it. In the world before, perhaps that was all right. It was easy to stay in touch. If you met a crew member you liked, you could message each other and meet in Moscow on another day.”

In the end, that was the last Christina saw of her too. Nina did not appear during the later meal and drink services, or when Christina left the aircraft.

Christina managed one final drag from her shortened cigarette, dropped it at her feet, and crushed out the ember. She took out a second cigarette and rolled it between her fingers without lighting it as she gazed absently at the gym across the street. The large pale-blue building on the other side of the two-lane road was concealed by the black iron fence around its grounds and a row of tall conifers. Only now and then, when the trees shifted in the wind, could she catch a glimpse of it.

Once, for no particular reason, Christina had gone inside. The parking lot was far too large for a place like this. Among the bicycles of local residents who had come to exercise stood several expensive cars that looked strangely out of place. On the ground floor were a reception desk and a rest area, where an unmotivated employee seemed to be waiting endlessly for closing time. The basement held a swimming pool. The gyms on the second and third floors were filled with new machines no one used, as though the city had bought them simply to exhaust the money left in its budget at the end of the fiscal year. The building had five floors, but the fourth and fifth were closed to everyone except authorized personnel.

*

Not long before, Christina had dreamed that someone shot her with a handgun on these very steps. With the apartment building’s dirty glass door behind her, she was threatened by two men who ordered her to leave. Each time she refused, one of them shot her without hesitation. The other stood in the middle of the street, arms folded, leaning silently against a glossy luxury car the color of beautiful mud. Strangely, no one else was there. Not even a car passed. It might have been morning. It might have been evening.

When she thought this might at last be the end, Christina reached into the pocket of her shorts with a trembling hand that no longer obeyed her. Somehow she pulled out a cigarette and put it between her lips. With the silver lighter that had appeared conveniently beside her, she tried to light it. One of the men shouted something and fired, blowing the lighter away along with her left hand.

The impact threw her backward. As her field of vision tilted toward the sky, she saw something pass overhead.

*

On her day off, Mingjia walked through a deserted Gardens by the Bay. Across the vast garden overlooking the sea, an elevated walkway called the Skyway stretched between structures shaped like trees.

The gray, overcast sky carried the promise of rain. For some reason, tourists were scarce, and the area was as quiet as a construction site closed to the public. With the sea behind her stood Marina Bay Sands: three hotel towers supporting an enormous outdoor pool shaped like a ship, a bold design that drew visitors from around the world. Mingjia settled onto a bench beside the large pond separating the hotel from the gardens.

She found herself thinking of one particular tourist. It was from the days when I worked part-time as a tour guide in college. The Merlion, Marina Bay Sands, and Gardens by the Bay were the standard route. I usually led groups, but there were few tourists that day, and only six people had signed up for my tour. The advance list contained several Chinese names. Even so, for reasons I could not explain, the group consisted of two Asian couples, one Japanese man—as I learned later—and one white man who spoke English.

When we reached Gardens by the Bay, I gave them a brief introduction, told them when to meet again, and let them explore on their own. After patiently answering the white man’s endless questions about Singapore’s water supply, I sat down to rest on a bench in the shade. The Japanese man had barely moved from the place where I had addressed the group. He was taking picture after picture of Marina Bay Sands with a single-lens reflex camera. He asked whether there was anywhere he could get almost directly beneath it, so I led him to the large pond where I was sitting now. He kept taking photographs there, and I stared blankly at his back.

Was the ship-shaped rooftop so unusual to a tourist? Was it the same as our wanting to visit the temples of Kyoto?

*

The earthquake the night before had been unusually strong for Singapore, its tremors stronger than many buildings had been designed to withstand. Mingjia had jumped out of bed and gone first to the living room. Several of her roommates had woken too, exchanging anxious looks. A slow lateral sway, like a pendulum, went on for a long time. “It’s as if some enormous creature deep underground rolled over in its sleep,” one of them said.

Before long the tremor subsided, and one by one they returned to their rooms. For some time Mingjia could not sleep. She could not stop wondering what would happen if the creature truly woke. The thought had a weight and texture that made it feel unlike a simple fantasy.

The Japanese man asked me to take his picture. Holding the camera he handed me, I stepped back and crouched so that he and Marina Bay Sands would fit neatly into the frame. Looking back now, there was something strange about the figure I saw through the viewfinder. His outline seemed blurred and translucent, as if his existence were wet paint bleeding into the scenery around him. But perhaps I only imagined it. Four years had passed since I graduated. Ambiguity always seeped into the past when we looked back at it, and perhaps the earthquake had affected me more than I realized.

All at once, I remembered the small Malaysian town where I had been born and raised. It was just across the border, a home I could return to whenever I wished, yet I had not gone back in years.

The ground seemed to move again. Mingjia tensed and looked around. Marina Bay Sands, towering in front of her, did not appear to be shaking. Gardens by the Bay remained as quiet as ever.

Then another violent tremor came. This time it was not her imagination. The slow, powerful shaking continued, and before long she saw an immense crowd of tourists trying to evacuate the hotel. The Japanese man had told her that earthquakes were common in Japan. Mingjia remained on the bench, unable to move.

*

The gray sky flashed so brightly that Mingjia could not even blink, and she could see nothing.

She felt rain on her skin. When she opened her eyes, Marina Bay Sands was gone without a trace. Mingjia stared, stunned, unable to believe what she saw. The three towers that had stood before her had vanished. They had not been destroyed. They had not collapsed. They were simply gone.

With nothing left to obstruct the view, she could see across Marina Bay to the Merlion spouting water. Mingjia still could not rise from the bench. Of the tourists who had fled the hotel during the earthquake, not one remained in sight. Where had they gone? Mingjia could make sense of none of it. After a while, for reasons even she did not understand, she began to cry quietly.

“J, you still cry as much as ever.”

From the Skyway above, Christina looked down at Mingjia.