Same Bed Different Dreams: A Novel

by Ed Park

Genres: Literary Fiction; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present—loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, pop bands and the perils of social media

“Your view of twentieth-century history will be enlarged and altered. . . . A Gravity’s Rainbow for another war, an unfinished war.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

In 1919, far-flung patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the tragic North-South split that remains today.

But what if the KPG still existed—now working toward a unified Korea, secretly pulling levers to further its aims? Same Bed Different Dreams weaves together three distinct narrative voices, and as reality twists like a kaleidoscope. Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives come together in this extraordinary and unforgettable novel.

Soon Sheen, a former writer now employed by the tech behemoth GLOAT, comes into possession of an unfinished book seemingly authored by the KPG. The manuscript is a riveting revisionist history, connecting famous names and obscure bit players to the KPG’s grand project—everyone from Syngman Rhee and architect-poet Yi Sang to Jack London and Marilyn Monroe. M*A*S*H is in here, too, as are the Moonies and a history of violence extending from the assassination of President McKinley to the Reagan-era downing of a passenger plane that puts the world on the brink of war.

From the acclaimed author of Personal Days, Same Bed Different Dreams is a raucously funny feat of imagination and a thrilling meld of history and fiction that pulls readers into another dimension—one in which utopia is possible.

Release date: November 7, 2023

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 513

Sample

THE SINS AUGUST THE JURY

From a distance, the black smoking station on the white pavement in front of the Admiral Yi resembled a chess piece, whether bishop or knight, I couldn’t decide. The matter seemed crucial as I approached. My daughter, Story, would have an opinion, but of course she wasn’t with me. She was seven, and chess figured prominently in her life. During one game, in the midst of crushing my kingside defenses, she said that the bishop was worth three points, same as a knight. (Then she put me in check.) The fact surprised me. I had reckoned bishops on par with rooks, knights a step below. Then again, the bishops were yoked to their starting colors, as though you were playing checkers. Perhaps the smoking station was just a pawn after all.

Dusk hung like velvet over West Thirty-second Street, what the sign called Korea Way, though I have never heard anyone use that name. I was in the city, on a weeknight no less, a rare event for me. My family and job were upstate in Dogskill, an hour and change via Metro-North. Not so very far; still, I didn’t like visiting Manhattan. It made me miss everything too much.

My appearance was a solid for Tanner Slow: old college roommate, dispenser of numerous good deeds on my behalf, and main link to the life I’d led years ago. Tanner had worn many hats over the years. He’d been a music journalist, fired for not liking music, and briefly a literary agent—he sold my first and only book, a story collection that I couldn’t bear to look at anymore. He once ran a Tucson charity that gave bikes to the homeless, and even worked at GLOAT in the aughts, hiring me during his brief tenure. But after his father the vitamin king died and left him a zillion dollars, Tanner set up the Slow Press, devoted to his three idiosyncratic passions: political graphic novels done with woodcuts, niche cookbooks, and neglected literature in translation. Last season he’d released a revisionist account of the Haymarket Riot, a set of Malaysian curry recipes that could be done using only a rice cooker, and a collection of nature essays by “Uganda’s E. B. White.”

Tonight was simple. Tonight I’d meet Tanner Slow’s newest author, Cho Eujin, once the enfant terrible of South Korean letters. The Slow Press had signed on to bring out his oeuvre in America, and he would be a visiting lecturer at Rue University Extension Campus that fall. Tanner swore I’d like him. I couldn’t find a clear picture of Cho online, but in my mind he resembled my father, gone now over thirty years. Also slated to appear was the reclusive artist Mercy Pang, another camera avoider. My wife, Nora, was pretty sure she’d babysat for her back in the ’90s, and wanted me to take a picture so she could check.

Despite the warmth of the day, I planned to lay into a tasty bowl of seolleongtang or kalguksu, down a few OBs, and say good night to one and all in my bad Korean. I’d make sure not to get roped into a karaoke situation. I was already rehearsing my exit line, the one about having to catch the train back home out of Grand Central.

Tonight would have been a rare treat—a pleasant evening with one of my oldest friends and his latest discovery—if not for all the Asian American literati who threatened to show up as well. Poets and editors and folks associated with Rue University’s Wildword program. I’d mix up people’s names. I’d have nothing to say to them. I was no longer in the game.

They viewed me as a traitor. My employer, GLOAT, was so vast that it almost lost definition—they all used at least a few of its many features—but in their eyes, I’d abandoned the life of the mind to service the Almighty Algorithm.

It was true that I didn’t write anymore. For a while, I kept story notes, and one summer even wrestled a novel partway out of my skull. It had proved too unwieldy, even dangerous: a hydra that spoke in tongues. I mapped out the plot on yard-high Post-its, slapped them on the walls while I wrote. Nora likened it to the handiwork of a cop trying to outguess a serial killer, or maybe the other way around.

I didn’t write anymore. My current fictioneering was limited to bedtime tales spun out for my daughter as a sleeping aid. They involved UFOs, her chief interest besides chess. I was good at describing alien spacecrafts zipping through the clouds and the capture of curious Earthlings with a tractor beam. Once the quarry got on board, though, I went into numbing detail about the layout of the control room, lulling Story to dreamland.

I didn’t write anymore. My last jab at literary journalism had been years ago, for the late lamented Lament, which had since gone from elegant bimonthly to wisp of a quarterly to dysfunctional website, before disappearing completely. “Clean Sheets” was a jeu d’esprit about the titles I’d salvaged, to Nora’s dismay, from the basement laundry rooms of apartments where we used to live. The essay posited that these castoff libraries—self-help tomes, mouse-munched thrillers, hiking guides in foreign languages—told a building’s secret history. It was my love letter to the city; right before it came out, we moved to Dogskill. When the issue arrived, I put it directly into the recycling bin. On Friday morning I wheeled the bin to the curb, where at 9:13 a truck with a robot arm held it aloft, turned it over to release the empty bottles and printed matter, then replaced it before driving off: the quintessential suburban port de bras.

I didn’t write anymore. My book of short stories, Pretenders,had come out a lifetime ago, before I met Nora, who was not yet a nail salon mogul; before Story opened a new chapter in my life; back when I was still ready to take on the world. Now all I did was work at GLOAT. I was a Rung 10. Like other company veterans, I’d bounced around various projects, not all of them slam dunks. I learned to own my failures: a key tenet of GLOAT’s corporate culture. After a while they started to seem like successes.

In my spare time, I lost at chess to Story, which made me proud, and walked our dog, Sprout, which calmed me down. I cleaned my inbox assiduously. Once a week I skimmed and deleted messages from GLOAT’s Korean culture listserv that I couldn’t escape. Even the company’s touted spam filters failed. Every so often I’d wade into a debate. Hot topics included the impossible reunification of North and South Korea, whether Japan owed reparations for World War II, and the genius of hangul, the Korean alphabet. (Word that a remote Indonesian tribe had chosen hangul over Roman letters as its mode of writing had recently sent the forum into ecstasy.) Sometimes I wondered what my parents would have said about such peninsular matters. Maybe my interest in the forum was a way of keeping them alive. In dreams, oddly, they spoke to me in Korean. They’d stuck to English while alive.

---

—

Up close the bishop was fuming. Where was the phantom smoker? Instinctively I scrabbled in my satchel for a loose cigarette. I barely smoked anymore, a pack a month. But even that was too much for Nora, who’d seen all the men in her family, down there in Argentina, and some of the women, most of them up in Canada now, succumb to diseases of the lung. I puffed outside, on the trail that wound behind Westgate, our development, and kept flasks of Scope like I was having an affair with the tobacco industry. Still Nora would tell me I smelled like death. I had to set a good example for Story.

A face in the window of the Admiral Yi put a stop to these thoughts: my face, looking uncertain, then relaxing into a hangdog grin. Pas mal, I thought. At least I’d lost some pounds, after taking on weight with Story’s advent. The secret: a few extra cigarettes. Further inspection of my middle-aged visage gave me vertigo, the pavement turning to sand beneath my shoes. Blood rushed away from my head, and I felt ten thousand brain cells evaporate by the second. I used to faint a lot, waking to worried voices on a nurse’s cot or a park bench or in a friend’s car. Now on Korea Way I reached out to steady myself, touching the strange glass before me. It was of variable thickness, optics changing with the slightest shift of perspective. I looked dark, then pale as milk. Adding to the confusion, oddly shaped regions lit up with video streams of Korean news, music videos, dramas. These miniature people had gleaming white skin, tinted hair, chins so chiseled they could double as can openers. In a generation, the whole race would be carved to perfection. Was this a form of self-hatred, to think of them as an army of attractive robots? I missed the homelier Koreans of my youth. Which is to say, I missed my mom and dad.

The cigarette dwindled. Life was short. Our dog, Sprout, was sick with Dorchester syndrome. The vet said three months, tops. How would Story take it? How would I? Our ailing mutt was exhibiting all the symptoms: chasing his tail, walking backward, bumping into things. I got one of those fancy GLOAT collars, which tracked his vitals, reporting anomalies to the vet. Sprout developed the classic Dorchester symptom of “archiving,” in which he eviscerated a book or magazine, then hid sections around the house or buried them in the backyard. The habit was distinct from the age-old practice of bone interment. The vet advised keeping our bedroom doors locked, our bottom shelves free of first editions.

Lately Sprout looked part beagle, part hairbrush. He wasn’t especially adorable, or even what might be termed “fun,” but he’d been with me forever—like Pretenders, he predated my time with Nora. I told him a lot. He was my four-footed pal, or at least my furry psychoanalyst. And he let me smoke without judgment. So what if he lunched on the printed word? Lately I wondered if my nicotine habit had made him ill. The vet said no, that Dorchester’s was congenital. He had likely expressed symptoms for years, only I’d been too blind to notice. Still, every time Sprout licked my hand, I thought: This is my fault.

The high-tech window of the Admiral Yi held a scattering of video screens. On the biggest oblong, a row of airtight vixens shimmied. Their hair color drew from every slice of the spectrum except black. I was pretty sure it was D5, a K-pop outfit that Story followed, or else Reality, a rival group. The word “Ah!” kept blinking on various surfaces—a street sign, a lollipop, someone’s pleathered butt—in English and hangul: 아! ah! (ah!) 아! In the lower-right corner, a variety-show host in blue-rimmed glasses chortled at his guests’ outrageous statements. On yet another screenlet, a Korean soap unfolded, Doctor Loves a Doctor, which Nora and I had wolfed down earlier that year. I could even identify the scene: Joonie, the country’s first female brain surgeon, was agonizing over whether to accept an offer at a more prestigious hospital, which would take her away from her secret crush on a manly nurse named K.T., who was actually from three years in the future, or something like that.

Amid these foreign illuminations was my real face, longer than I recalled, as though warped by a fun-house mirror. Distinguished, cerebral; a man of letters. For a moment I could picture myself in one of those tall black hats Korean men wore in the nineteenth century. Then my face coughed into a fist—but I was still smoking, cigarette between lips. I discerned a wash of stubble in my reflection; but my chin was freshly shaved. I watched in astonishment as the face turned away, dissolving into the depths of the Admiral Yi.

It was with considerable unease, then, that I opened the stout wooden door and followed that phantom inside.

---

—

The Admiral Yi was two years old, but this was my first visit. In keeping with the name, a maritime theme ran through it, though its application was haphazard, anachronistic: a tiller here, skeins of netting there, and too many rubber crustaceans. I spotted a poster for the film version of Moby Dick, another for Jason and the Argonauts. The air was clammy by design, recessed misters spritzing. Everywhere I looked were portraits of the titular hero, next to scrolls of calligraphy that may or may not have related his deeds.

Admiral Yi was a legendary naval commander, the most famous figure in Korean history. He repelled a Japanese invasion back in the sixteenth century, using armored “turtle boats” called kobukson. They had enormous shell tops that protected the crew while they fired the cannons that lined the sides. The prows featured fearsome reptilian heads spouting smoke, baleful flames flickering in the eyes. The tale involved some heroic ratio, doubtless inflated, like thirty kobukson fending off an invading force of three hundred warships, the admiral using his intimate knowledge of tidal peculiarities to his advantage. It was enough to keep the Japanese at bay for a few more centuries.

The hostess greeted me in Korean.

“I’m with the Slow party,” I replied, charmlessly steering our interaction into English. “I think there’s a private room?”

“S…roe-uh?” She gave it three syllables.

“It’s a large party under the name Tanner Slow. S-L-O-W.”

I took a menu, which doubled as a pamphlet modestly titled Admiral Yi: The Greatest Naval Genius in the World.

“Ess…err…Oh, Mr. Slow!” She beamed, rattled off something in Korean that I didn’t catch. I heard the word for “author,” and for a second I thought she meant me. But of course she meant Tanner Slow’s latest literary find: Cho Eujin, the so-called Scourge of Seoul. She took out a sleek Korean paperback and showed me his autograph, freshly affixed to the flyleaf.

“Architect and Dictator,” she said, with touching precision. “I’m biggest fan.”

As she led me back, I passed portholes cut in the walls: cunning video screens that showed turquoise waves splashing against the side. My phone throbbed with a message from Dr. Ubu, my supervisor at GLOAT. I silenced it. We turned a corner and there they were.

---

—

“The man of the hour,” said Monk Zingapan, as I made my way to the one empty chair. He sounded baked, but then he always did. “You’re late, dickweed.”

“It’s eight,” I said amiably, then noticed that the guests were well into their main courses. How had I gotten the time wrong? It didn’t matter. I was happy to be there. I loved the smell of the meat cooking, the hit of garlic, the notes of beer and egg and rice.

Two long tables had been set up end to end, with a shorter one jutting out where they intersected. They were heaped with banchan dishes: four kinds of kimchi, five kinds of greens, the brown gelatinous acorn slabs known as muk, potato salad, grilled mackerels, wedges of pajeon, dense dark beans that I didn’t know the name of, on and on. We rarely had Korean food up in Dogskill, so far from civilization. How I missed it! I wanted to pour it all into my mouth, one morsel after another, followed by bulgogiwrapped in lettuce leaves and slathered with ssamjang, and a bowl of jjajangmyeon for good measure, but Monk felt the need to keep talking.

“Didn’t you see my text? We started an hour ago.” His amazing old face, with its ten million creases and skin tags, hardened into a mask of outrage. Then he relaxed and gave me a fist bump, which became a clumsy play for my balls, which meant he was drunk. “Mr. Soon Sheen here needs an engraved invitation,” Monk brayed. “He lives in his country manor up there in Fishkill and never checks his messages.”

“Dogskill,” I corrected.

“I didn’t ask what you did for lunch.”

“Kill is Dutch for ‘creek.’ ”

“You pedantic gook.” He reeked of soju.

“You gook has-been.”

“The gook, the thief, his wife, and her lover.”

“I think you mean ‘your mother.’ ”

“Too many gooks spoil the plot.”

We used to argue over the etymology of that slur. Monk, originally from Manila, said it dated from the Spanish-American War, a corruption of some Filipino phrase; I had read that it was a relic from the Korean War, a misunderstanding or perversion of the word for country. We were both trying to take ownership, as they would say at GLOAT.

“C’mere, grasshopper,” he cough-cackled, arms wide. “Bring it in.”

We hugged. He looked like Yoda’s older brother, with the hairiness of an Ewok, but then he’d always looked like that. Monk had held some vaporous editorial role at an overstuffed arts and culture rag called the N.Y. Whip, where I worked on the IT end of things, way back in my twenties. It was my first real job in the city. The Whip was in decline, everyone told me, though people had been saying that for years. Nothing was ever as good as it had been. The fat, lemon-colored broadside, virtually impossible to read on the subway without triggering a border skirmish, was subsidized by voluminous ads for risqué chat lines and affordable futons.

Monk had been at the Whip since its late ’70s heyday. A decade later, he began Manila Wafers, an immense poem cycle about…it was unclear. Certainly his heritage played a role. Life in the Coast Guard. A doomed romance, a child he never knew. (Or maybe he was the child?) Portions appeared in the Whip as column filler. The manuscript ultimately ran a thousand pages, albeit some with only a few words scattered like birdfeed or even just an inverted question mark. Every year, he submitted it for dozens of prizes, and in 1999, Manila Wafers beat out sixty other entries to win the Peter Dong Award for Distinguished Pan-Asiatic Writing, named after a Rue trustee who’d given several buttloads of cash toward the notion of a Shanghai satellite campus. Dong in hand, Monk Zingapan made the jump—spryly, for a sexagenarian—from the fading realm of alternative newspaperdom to the marginally less moribund world of academia. Now he headed the Wildword creative writing program at Rue University Extension Campus, what he called the Harvard of West Twenty-seventh Street. Matte-covered journals from Brooklyn to Berkeley tirelessly brought out his work.

I took my seat. At ten o’clock was Yuka Tsujimoto, award-winning playwright, resplendent in her trademark gilt fez. She sported a necklace that looked like one of those sleep pillows you wear on an airplane, and a sort of asymmetric denim romper. She had tenure at Rue and could wear anything she damn well pleased. Alarmingly, I’d known Yuka more than half my life, since we were both twenty and on the Penumbra College Advisory Board on Asian-American Life, or PCABAAL. We had dated, stayed frenemies. Yuka was pointedly avoiding me, perhaps still sore from the time Nora and I left one of her plays early, a six-hour reimagining of The Taming of the Shrew set in feudal Japan. Reviewers called it her best yet, but audiences never warmed to the wordless adaptation, done in the style of Noh drama and featuring actual shrews.

I could see Tanner Slow at the end of the table, head bent in conversation. He was roughly six foot, five thousand inches. Visible even from this distance were large tracts of poorly integrated sunscreen that enhanced his ghostly pallor. He was religious about sunscreen, applying it even in the depths of winter. His hair looked different, like he’d lost some on top but gained follicles on the sides. He was talking to a serious-looking Korean in a dark suit and blood-red tie.

Closer to me, lean, handsome Padraig Kong, his striped silk shirt open at the collar, was sitting next to a thin, extraordinarily pretty woman resembling my long-lost cousin Gemma.

“What I really want is meeoguk,” he announced. “Do you think they have meeoguk? If someone opened a meeoguk place, they’d make a killing.”

Padraig appeared determined to repeat meeoguk as many times as possible, a display of his forays into Korean cuisine. Even over the course of three sentences, his slight British accent deepened, and a dreamy look spread across his face. This could only mean one thing: he was falling in love. He did this with impressive regularity. By all accounts he enjoyed a thriving romantic life. Rumored among his conquests were modern dancers, indie starlets, taiko drummers, and at least one current city council member, not to mention a fair number of coworkers, board members, and janitorial staff at the Asian American Watchdog and Creative Writers’ Association, of which he was executive director, the youngest in its history. Though press coverage invariably included the word “boyish,” I thought thirty was pushing the boundaries of that adjective. I was theoretically a member of AAWCWA (commonly pronounced “Awkward”), though I hadn’t paid dues or attended an event since moving to Dogskill. That didn’t stop their flyers from landing in my mailbox.

Some people I didn’t recognize were sitting at the other end and along the jutting sidebar table. Four seats down from me was Loa Ding, with her sun-streaked mane. Years ago, a college-age Loa had interviewed me about my book—the best (and, so far, only) such discussion of my work. It was a piece for slanted+enchanted, the ADC (Asian diaspora culture) zine she’d started at age fifteen from the back room of her parents’ Honolulu dumpling hut. We had talked on the phone for hours. I had probably said too much. In the intervening years she’d parlayed her brand into a street-fashion line (its ironic slant-eye logo dotting handbags and phone cases for a season), then a boutique marketing firm. Loa was going places.

We gave a long-distance high-five. She said something in her pretty island lilt.

“What?” I cupped a hand to my ear.

“Footnote!”

That was Loa’s nickname for me. Her view was that unless I published another book—one grappling squarely with my hyphenated identity—I’d be a footnote in the history of ADC literature. This had haunted me at first, but I was okay with it now. A footnote was better than nothing, but in truth even nothing was fine by me.

Loa gave me a Hawaiian “hang loose” sign. Her tremendously chill surface masked a will to power. A Harvard Business Reviewprofile had called her the most influential tastemaker for all things Asian American, explaining how her new marketing agency captured the transpacific zeitgeist. In the picture she wore a cheongsam, tanned legs crossed at the ankle. She was seated at the antique surfboard that doubled as her desk, atop which reposed various East Asian signifiers: big ceramic fortune cookie, white cat waving its paw, Chinese takeout carton.

“I’ve been meaning to email,” I said, a sentence that constituted a true statement I could say to anyone—that, in fact, could stand as a motto of sorts.

“Soon Sheen! I need to pick your brain!” Loa said.

“Oh?” I could make out her vintage New York Review of BooksT-shirt.

“I’m following in your footsteps!”

“She’s writing a book,” Monk hissed, over my shoulder.

“What’s it about?”

“How to be your own brand.” He turned on a heel to shoot the breeze with a slender but commanding woman I hadn’t noticed before. She seemed to listen intently without expending any mental energy. Her utterly nondescript face was charged with meaning. Was this the elusive Mercy Pang? I took out my phone, thumbed it to camera mode. I tried to snap a picture for Nora, but Monk’s head kept getting in the way.

---

—

Tanner Slow looked up from his conversation down the table. A pair of reading glasses swung from his neck, a neck as long as most people’s heads.

“Good God,” he said. “Sweet Lord in heaven.”

Tanner favored such expressions, though he was nominally some sort of free-range Taoist.

“Slow-Mo,” I said.

“The sleeper awakes!”

“I messed up the time.”

“Not to worry, my friend. Don’t get up.”

“What do you mean, don’t get up? You don’t get up.”

Tanner walked over with the man he was talking to—who was, I now realized with a start, the one I’d observed through the glass. The man I took for some stubbled version of me.

“Meet Echo,” Tanner said, patting the man’s shoulder and mine.

“Echo?” I stood up and shook his friend’s hand. Then I bowed. Then he bowed, amused, and gave me the once-over as I did the same. He was older, with streaks of gray in his still thriving head of hair. Something more than a five o’clock shadow lent extra drama to his face. Large eyes nested in wrinkles. There was something ruined about his mouth, maybe the ghost of a harelip or residue of a grimace from angrier days. In that light he looked like a Korean Bogart. He wore a kind of poetic suit assembled from thirty different kinds of silk, with subtle beltings and folds that might have been pockets. It looked simple and complicated, very humble and very expensive all at once.

“As you know, the Slow Press is proud to be publishing all the works to date, and many works to come”—Tanner rapped the table for luck—“of the great Cho Eujin, under a new name: Echo.”

“Echo, echo, echo…” Monk added, for effect. No one laughed. He had likely pulled the same gag earlier in the evening.

I gave a low whistle. “Just one name.”

“Yes.”

“Power move.”

“We took the E from ‘Eujin’ and connected it with the ‘Cho,’ ” Tanner explained.

“You’ll save a lot on printing costs, throwing out four letters,” Monk grunted. He’d moonlighted as production manager when The New York Whip was renamed N.Y. Whip, later extracting the periods for even greater savings.

“I think this is going to do the trick, honest to God,” Tanner said. “We hired some marketing ninjas.” He nodded in Loa Ding’s direction.

“The mononym route has risks, but can lead to great success,” she said.

“Worst fortune cookie ever,” Monk laughed. Loa gave him the finger.

“I am like Madonna,” said Echo, in surprisingly fluent English.

“I wonder what’s a literary equivalent,” Tanner mused.

“Rumi,” Loa Ding said. “Echo is going to be the next Rumi.”

Echo arched an eyebrow. “Who-me?”

I liked this guy, and hoped I would like his actual writing. I’d accumulated a dozen works on Korean history and politics since college but had barely read any fiction. Not a lot had been translated, and the titles I’d managed to find—at places like Koryo Books, just up the block from the Admiral Yi—had struck me as clunky on the sentence level, overly rustic, or both. Also, the names blurred together, even for me. Korean names, with their three rigid, often interchangeable syllables, would always be hard for the anglophone reader to tell apart. In this way, at least, “Echo” would stand out.

“And as you can see, some of our old, ah, friends on the Wildword faculty at Rue U. Extension are here in full force,” said Tanner. “They’re getting acquainted with Echo, who’s teaching there in the fall.”

A server passed our private room, tray loaded with cups of persimmon punch. Tanner snagged one on the fly. He brought me face-to-face with Echo again.

“This is my dearest pal, the one and only Soon Sheen, who is Korean, pardon me, Korean American. He’s one of our great unsung writers.” I could tell Tanner believed every word. “He wrote a brilliant thing not long ago about books you find in laundry rooms. Do you have those in Korea?”

The author smiled politely.

“A lot of New Yorkers have to do their laundry in the basements of their buildings,” Tanner continued, “and they leave books there for other people to read. Of course, in this country, laundromats are, ah, associated with Asian immigrants—ADC, if you will—so the piece was working on multiple levels.”

Tanner’s faith was touching. He seemed to recall every paragraph I’d ever put out into the world, conveniently ignoring the fact that I no longer wrote. It should also be noted that the last time Tanner did his own laundry was perhaps never. Even in our Penumbra College days, he’d have it done by a service called W&C, which I later learned stood for Whites and Coloreds.

“We’ll hit a bookstore tomorrow,” Tanner said. “Or tonight! I want to get you Soon’s first one, Pretenders.” He turned to me: “Can you recall, did we ever sell the Korean rights?”

“We did not.” Pretenders was a rarefied creation, unavailable outside the U.S. and more often than not unavailable inside the U.S. as well. I might as well have written it with a twig on the surface of a puddle.

Tanner didn’t miss a beat. “In any case, you must read it. And I have to tell you, Soon Sheen, that Echo is the most fantasticKorean writer you’ve never heard of. A situation that is going to change, and change soon.” He winked. “Pun not intended.”

“Ha.”

“Now, I’m not supposed to say this, but a source tells me Echo’s on the secret long list for the…you know.”

“Eh?”

“The Big N.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“The Nobel Prize.”

Echo shook his head humbly, just as Loa Ding collared him for a word.

“Hope I didn’t jinx it,” Tanner said, rapping the table three times. “The Slow Press is kicking things off next month with one of his best: The Sins.”

I blinked. That had been the working title of a project of mine, many years ago. Something I’d never finished. “What’s it about?”

“It’s, ah, hard to say.”

“My kind of book.” Much as I admired Tanner and the Slow Press, my old friend had a track record of putting out books that were the written equivalent of chloroform.

“That’s the spirit. You won’t know what hit you. He calls it a novel in three novels. Brilliant, right?”

I didn’t mention that the advance copy was in my bag. I’d had it for a month or so, without cracking it open, or even registering the title—my title. The Sins! Of course, Tanner had no clue that I’d tried to write a book with the same handle, but I felt irritated all the same.

“Think of a cross between H. P. Lovecraft and, ah, L. P. Hartley,” he said, then sighed. “Nobody reads L. P. Hartley anymore.” Sixty percent of that sentence was a template he used regularly, in the past filling it with such names as Karel Čapek, Mary Butts, B. S. Johnson, Amos Tutuola, and others known only to a dwindling cognoscenti.

“Loa Ding says I can’t use that comparison,” he griped, “unless I want negative sales.”

“Probably true.”

“Anyway, what I like about Echo’s new name is that it feels contemporary, but also carries with it an echo of the past.”

“Echo, echo, echo,” came Monk’s joke, which was getting funny again.

“Because he’s not just, ah, charging forward with the art form. He’s also got all of modern Korean history swirling inside him.”

“It’s like having dizzies,” the novelist said. Disease. “A dizzies from which there is no cure.”

“Not that he’s trapped in the past. He worked in computers for a long time. It gave him a real perspective on technology.”

“It gave me carpal tunnel,” he said, massaging a wrist.

“They call Echo the Scourge of Seoul. His feuds are legendary—and so, too, his love affairs. But he’s a real sweetheart, as you can see.”

“I come to America, and I behave,” Echo said with a wink. “But not for long.”

“You should have my buddy Monk take you out on the town.” I indicated the head of Rue’s Wildword program, who was trying to pick up a waitress, in both senses of the phrase.

Tanner Slow shut down that avenue of talk. “Thankfully, we have his wonderful translator and aide-de-camp, Daisy Oh, all the way from Seoul as well, to keep our man in line.”

I hadn’t noticed Daisy before, but now she was right in front of me. Barrettes fortified her short hair. Thick cat’s-eye glasses balanced on a wide, freckled nose. Her lips were askew, giving her a skeptical look, as though Tanner had bungled the intro. Her necklace was strung with trinkets, each a Korean signifier: a celadon pitcher, a yin-yang pendant, an old broken coin, even one of Admiral Yi’s kobukson shrunk to the size of a peanut. As with Echo, I liked her at once, if for different, even opposing reasons.

---

—

Daisy was quiet at first, looking right into my eyes. That wasn’t what Asians did, at least not those of my generation and Nora’s. Here was the new breed. I held her gaze for two seconds, then looked away as I always did.

“Mr. Soon Sheen.” Her voice was both dead and alive. “I’ve wanted to meet you since forever.”

Proclaiming herself a superfan, Daisy brought up Pretenders,not to mention stray bits of Sheenian paper-blackening I barely recalled. Some pieces, such as my 1995 pull-no-punches reappraisal of T. S. Kim’s 1985 novel Man in Korean Costume, in the pages of the defunct NY Whip, had never appeared online. It was pre-Y2K, practically pre-internet. How had she seen it? There was no digital archive. Back then, you either read something or you missed it forever.

She slapped my back. “Dude, I’ve read your book five times.”

“No way.” I burst into what Nora called NAL, Nervous Asian Laughter. NAL wasn’t solely a symptom of anxiety or embarrassment. It could be triggered by surprise, pride, lust—by almost anything save actual humor.

“Pretenders, man. The last line gave me the chills.”

Did Daisy mean the last line of the story “Pretenders” or the last line of the last story in the book Pretenders? It had been so long since I’d thought of my book that I couldn’t recall either passage.

“Your stuff is on the same wavelength as Echo’s,” Daisy said.

This was flattery with an aim, I knew. Still, it felt nice to be praised for a change. At GLOAT, my value corresponded to how fully my identity was subsumed by the team’s. At home, it wasn’t clear I had much value at all.

“Echo, Echo,” she said, testing the name. “Hope it sticks. Have you read The Sins yet?”

I shook my head. “Is it about the seven deadly sins?”

“Hardly. It’s a novel in three novels.”

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“One of the novels is a locked-room mystery, where the victim gets killed through his computer.”

“Gnarly.” Gnarly?

“Echo’s the real deal. Colorful life, too. Tragically orphaned in the Korean War. Found in a ditch in his dead mother’s arms, trying to suckle. Can you imagine? Wrote raunchy poems during the Park Chung Hee regime. He had a column in a left-wing paper in the seventies attacking his fellow travelers, then moved to a right-wing rag and did the same to them. Drank. Got a hundred girls pregnant. Lampooned the lit world. The Scourge of Seoul. His first novel was The Architect and the Dictator, which won all the awards before it was banned. The awards were withdrawn. It became popular in North Korea, sold on the black market. There was a rumor that he died while working on the follow-up, rubbed out for political reasons. But he’s still around, as you can see.”

Looking at Echo, creator of important work, I plunged into glum remembrance of my own Pretenders, which Tanner had touted as “Alice Munro meets H. H. Munro.” A debut story collection, barely distinguishable from the six other debut story collections that launched the same day. It’s bad taste to say “…and that day was 9/11,” but that day was 9/11. It was hard not to see that as a sign.

“The Sins is good,” she said, “but his next book is the one I’m stoked for. Coming out in December. Or March. Or never. He has a bad case of gums.”

“Gums?”

Daisy looked shocked. “You forgot?”

“Huh?”

“GUMS! From your Lament piece about Robert Musil—you know, Great Unfinishable Masterpiece Syndrome?”

“Right, right.” I had coined countless acronyms in my time.

“He keeps adding, subtracting, recasting. He loses whole sections for months at a time. A Korean journal published a chapter, and readers went nuts. In a bad way.”

“Like fistfights breaking out after The Rite of Spring. But why did people hate it?”

“It wasn’t hatred but something more primal. A fear of going insane. Echo called Same Bed the hidden history of Korea. People didn’t recognize their country.”

“A little too hidden.”

“Now Echo says he wants to publish the whole thing only in the U.S.—translated. A big middle finger to Korea. Like Thomas Bernhard refusing to let his books come out in Germany.”

“Austria.”

“What?”

“His native country—he hated it. But he was fine with his books appearing elsewhere.”

Daisy took out her phone to fact-check. If she was looking on GLOAT for answers, she was reading text I’d written, circa 2008.

“What a coup for the Slow Press,” I said. “An Echo original.”

“The contract is a nightmare. Tanner’s wary of committing, since it might never be finished.”

“Good old GUMS.” I emitted some NAL. “What’s the book called?”

Daisy set down her phone and put her hands together as if praying. “Same Bed, Different Dreams.” Her palms opened like a book. “We might lose the comma.”

“What does the Scourge of Seoul think about the title?”

She peered at the man of the hour. “Echo’s super mellow when you get to know him. He’s not this, like, sex addict with steam coming out of his ears. Well, not usually. He can’t stand most other authors.”

“Wonder how he feels about T. S. Kim.”

“Probably hates him, just like you. Your article tore Kim a new one.”

I let out some NAL. In truth, I felt bad about that review-slash-jeremiad. I hadn’t exactly read Kim’s work. ...