His parents were disturbed by the pictures of himself he sent home, and by his increasingly foreign intonations when talking to them on the phone, for in his daily life the Korean language had become like a trophy sword kept over the mantel, an unused adornment. He had sex with American girls and seemed so at home in Humboldt that people from out of town pulled over while driving to ask him directions. Once when his van broke down he hitched a ride to a mechanic with a schoolteacher named Elaine who didn’t know the first thing about efforts to strengthen the Environmental Protection Agency’s jurisdiction over the local logging industry, and when he informed her of them she was impressed and asked if he’d grown up in Eureka, which was a flattering question. He didn’t plan ever to visit South Korea again. He was free.
At just after two in the afternoon Joon-sup finished reading thirty-four small-font pages of a loan application for the restaurant he wanted to open, the Joon-sup Experience. His head hurt and he had to go to a rally in Arcata for the Pacific black brant and other migratory waterfowl that annually made a stop in the shoals of Humboldt Bay, so he put down the hefty application and got in his turtle-green Volkswagen bus and put on a music collection of stoned hippie reggae standards about Marcus Garvey and sensimilla and the scandal of the Banana Republics. Lighting a sausage-sized joint, he backed out of his numbered parking space in front of his apartment, running bump over something that turned out to be a deflated football left out by one of the building kids. The joint smoldered as he came to a stop sign and his mother had called in the morning because she had met someone she wanted him to consider. Yes, she knew he was in America now and had adopted certain regrettable American customs and had once said, in a breach of filial respect so extreme it had left her speechless, that he would marry whomever he wanted, be she white, Asian, African, or transvestite, but she had met the most remarkable girl with a university degree and knew Joon-sup couldn’t refuse to just look at this girl’s picture and read her handwritten note about herself. He couldn’t possibly be so insensitive. The package was on its way.
There was a trippy knocking sound in this dance-hall song, like an echoing submarine sonar noise, that was spacier for the subwoofer and thousand-dollar equalizer Joon-sup had recently installed in his van. He frowned at a red light on his dashboard that flickered on and off, thought he recognized the burrito maker standing outside Amigas Burrito, accelerated and worried about his lack of loan collateral, cursed his Asian hair for being so difficult to dreadlock, and figured that the picture of his “intended” would look nothing like she did in real life, that it would be doctored into the realm of fantasy. One of his old school friends worked in a photography studio in Pusan where ninety percent of the customers were women insisting that the studio airbrush to the extent of reconfiguring noses and lightening skin colors and trimming neck widths. Marriage was such a desperate business in South Korea, and what was Joon-sup supposed to do, see the picture and flip and—
Joon-sup snapped to attention. A man was standing in the middle of the road on the outskirts of Eureka, directly in front of Joon-sup’s van traveling at 42 mph. The guy was maybe three seconds away, meaning that Joon-sup couldn’t possibly stop in time, though he slammed on the brakes reflexively as a low scream got stuck in his throat. The man had appeared from out of nowhere, with his legs spread apart like he was about to draw in a shootout. Joon-sup thought, in a spasm of fear, Holy fuck I am going to hit this guy and braced himself for the impact, tensed and skidding and seeing everything in slow motion. His white knuckles on his enormous steering wheel, involuntarily closing his eyes and—
Nothing happened. No kerchunk and smashed metal and street-smeared pedestrian. Joon-sup was merely slowing to a stop just past Kinko’s and a shoe store and a veterinary clinic, beyond the place in the road where the man had stood. Cars honked as they swerved around his parked van. Joon-sup craned his neck in every direction and then looked at the reefer in his hand. He’d had a hallucination. With his Gatling-gun heart going rat-a-tat-tat, Joon-sup shifted into gear and sped up onto the highway. He had to be cool, be cool. Cars continued to gust by and a highway patrol vehicle got a good look at him. Feeling the police stare, Joon-sup looked straight ahead and finally reached the speed limit and tried to seem unconcerned with the fact that he was holding a marijuana cigarette in plain view. It was only a cigar and Joon-sup was just a conscientious driver. But normal people looked around when they drove, so he made some natural-seeming head turns and saw the face of the highway patrolwoman, a Laotian in a flat-topped police hat. He smiled and made a little bow with his chin. She slitted her eyes and moved on.
When Joon-sup parked along the edge of the Arcata Plaza, still shaking, the Humans for the Pacific Black Brant rally was about forty people in clusters around an Earth Mother woman wearing a lavender sarong and standing on a large box with the word “soap” stenciled across every side. Two of Joon-sup’s coworkers from the Better Bagel, Alleycat and Soulbrother, held hand-painted posters with colorful depictions of the black brant in flight. Majestic creatures, rare and fine with white bellies and noble dark wings, requiring large areas of undisturbed tundra in which to stop during their flights between the Arctic Coastal Plain and Baja California. Joon-sup had never seen one of these birds in the flesh, which was compelling evidence that something needed to be done to protect them. He had almost killed someone. Manslaughter. Plans to develop offshore oil drilling along the northern Humboldt seashore—and what a dangerous future the state faced without adequate electricity—were getting daily more serious, so a group of environmentalists and concerned local citizens had come to protest the quick fix of fossil fuel development. He had driven right through a man.
“Jack,” said Alleycat in his feral purr, “what’s the good word?” Alleycat was pot-bellied with a Vandyke goatee and Van Gogh red hair.
Joon-sup shrugged.
“The mayor was here a minute ago,” said Soulbrother, “to bestow his blessing.”
“It was a bestowal,” agreed Alleycat.
“Said the city council has penned a letter to Congressman Sawyer demanding that the oil scouts be held in abeyance.” Soulbrother wore a nest of Ugandan bead necklaces and held a jade-tipped staff in his left hand. Alleycat also had a staff, though his was a weathered piece of driftwood without ornamentation.
“Until it can be proven that the black brant doesn’t nest in the sound.”
“Except that everyone knows it does, so we’ll get a permanent abeyance.”
“It’s crafty and it’s just.”
“The fate of the Pacific black brant is intricately tied to the fate of California itself,” the woman with the microphone was saying. “If we allow its natural habitat to be torn up so Big Oil can come in and bleed the ocean for a few more years of gas dependency, what’ll we have? We’ll have a displaced black brant, which might just be an extinct black brant, and a wounded Humboldt Sound and further retardation of alternative energy research. Will the problem of California’s energy needs be solved by however many millions of barrels of crude oil can be pumped out of our ocean? Of course not. There are far too many of us, and our needs are too great. All we’ll have as a result is a permanently impaired ecosystem.” She paused and looked searchingly at the crowd and someone made a low moaning noise. “Does anyone remember the Bligh Reef in the upper Prince William Sound, where Exxon spilled eleven million gallons of oil in 1989? While efforts to clean it up succeeded in some ways, there were still vestiges left over a decade later, in areas sheltered from weathering processes, such as in the subsurface under selected gravel shorelines, and in some soft substrates containing peat.” A quick scan of the people around Joon-sup showed how unacceptable this was. Peat in the soft substrates? She might as well have been describing child pornography.
Joon-sup clasped his shaking hands behind his back and declined Alleycat and Soulbrother’s