How Liam Talbot came to have his house was unclear. An elderly aunt had died, and after Tupperware from the wake was washed, sorted, and returned to its rightful owner, this left him with a few sticks of furniture and a front door with no lock. Initially he was determined to keep up a brave face in the desolation, though leaving an indelible mark on the landscape required inordinate resourcefulness.
Consequently the homesteader became a hoarder and perennial displayer of Christmas decorations. Harsh prairie wind offered resistance to this idea. Everything was made mindless by it: It stunted trees, decoupled copulating insects, and cajoled senescent wallpaper to whistle in timber-framed houses. Little ground was given to form opinions, and those not carried off by self-inflicted gunshot wounds eventually succumbed to erosion.
It was not unusual to see the curator on a ladder with a stapler, even in sweltering summer, refastening felt snow blankets and strings of blinking lights to his roof where wind succeeded in prying them loose. He conducted a daily inspection of his little acre, righted toppled plastic snowmen (weighted with bricks), and sponged off his eight cedar reindeer.
By day’s end, and on most days, the wind wound down to a whisper; and where weather was not inclement, the prairie at dusk was too much for a brooder to resist. He often walked the boundary of his property and scanned the horizon for signs of encroachment. One evening he saw what he first thought to be the planet Mercury low in the western sky. When this twinkle did not budge over several days, the presence of a new weathervane was deduced over the hillock. An uninhabited house lay in this direction, and this development indicated that someone may have taken up residence there.
Liam had been a happy, productive introvert until recently, when he started a dalliance with a younger library assistant in Waverly Bean. Margaret pursued him initially, and being polite and pliant, the wight was overtaken by novelty and circumstance. The two shared a genuine connection, and never quarreled with the unspoken understanding that the relationship was one argument away from ending. To the degree Liam attached the moniker of ‘boyfriend’ to himself, he found intemperate satisfaction in routines, despite finding little emotional substance in routines generally. Yet to the degree he was capable of introspection on these matters, his love ran through a deep wiring of habit, and manifested itself naturally as devotion.
A girlfriend, necessarily, became structurally indispensable to his well being: one additional palisade against an unsympathetic landscape and the worst aspects of his character. A lack of romantic intensity (as such things are impermanent) had the benefit of lengthening the duration of the alliance, because the absence of obsession promoted staidness of mind and avoided mistrust.
His dating Margaret pleased his mother. The death of Liam’s father, and thoughts of his own mortality, also prepared this ground. Cultivated attachments have ways of becoming realities into themselves, as was the case here.
On balance the boyfriend never thought of himself as anyone desirable, or at least had not done so since his tempestuous twenties. As a dreamer, he was never a planner, and never prospered as an artist, or had compelling reason to prosper. His future came to resemble his past where, at least through memory, he connected to family and a notion of thriving.
He worked as a continuing education instructor at the local community college teaching night classes in painting and drawing, and because this livelihood relied on the discretionary income of others within a small population, the work was unreliable. The instructor supplemented his needs by painting mail order portraits of pets based on photographs sent to him. Dogs and cats were the norm (mainly deceased ones with names like Beauregard and Napoleon), although a bad Polaroid of a box turtle was not uncommon. These commissions came from advertisements placed in the back of pet fancier magazines. He pursued this trade earnestly, although realized he would never have the organization or wherewithal to make a viable career of it.
One of Liam’s regular students, Howard Meade, put him onto an employment opportunity that promised a steadier paycheck. The particulars of the situation were extraordinary since the job required no skill beyond a capacity to endure protracted periods of inactivity and boredom. The student sold the teacher on the idea that it was a golden opportunity to improve his anatomical drawing skills.
In a world of faceless avatars, electronic transactions had material consequences in the real world, where the transference of ownership of huge tracts of land were carried out instantaneously, and with little thought for sovereign identities emblazoned on flags of State. Once-isolationist North Korea began asserting itself on the world stage by gobbling up strategic plots of land in the Americas. As bearing on Liam’s situation, they purchased a disused factory complex in South Dakota, north of The Badlands.
The previous business in that location manufactured life-size Nativity figures, and it was less about blasphemy than enticement that the Koreans repurposed the facilities to construct another type of human figure. A “town” was constructed to display their wares. This location was not dissimilar to propagandistic villages created along the DMZ in their homeland. Here the intent was to lure male workers (preferably those skilled in oil fracking) over the frontier with promises of lucrative earnings and polygamy. Female mannequins were provocatively dressed and staged in front of bright windows in (what appeared to be) a house of ill repute. Speakers mounted to a parapet embroidered the inducement, and threw Pidgin English, buried in shrill, desperate melodies, against the white-faced crags of nearby buttes. Good times were to be had by any man making his way into the compound, although the blaring grabble mostly bounded back onto the premises empty handed. Regardless, rumors circulated about able-bodied men being shanghaied and taken back to Pyongyang to replenish a dwindling population and workforce. Nothing in the opposing camp’s secretive behavior dispelled this speculation.
Otis Elevator had maintained a factory in the same industrial complex, and built a ten-story tower for the testing of industrial elevators. (This structure was not especially conspicuous on a landscape dominated by grain silos.) The Feds got a good deal on the facilities when Otis’ closed its operation. Its upper floor was converted into an observation platform to keep track of the Koreans’ movements.
Liam was not a combatant, but hired (without benefits) to do a job formerly performed by the National Guard. His duty required him to sit in a chair throughout the afternoon hours and monitor the unchanging Theatre of The Absurd on the other side of a chain-link fence. Little brain real estate was needed to check off boxes on a daily log, which chronicled the enemy’s regimented timetable. He only needed the routine on the other end of his binoculars to match the expectation of paperwork; and the less paperwork, the better.
Soldiers frequently appeared on stage to move the smiling, lingerie-clad mannequins. This was less to create the illusion that life got on in the pretend brothel than to stir dust. The occasional reshuffling of deck chairs on the Titanic never quite righted the doomed liner, and the Koreans had long abandoned any thought their fantasy tempted those looking in. Weeks had passed since they last changed the propaganda broadcast.
David, the morning observer, rarely met Liam at the door in the shift changeover. He was a nervous fellow of saturnine tendencies, and often complained of a petulant stomach and other ailments. He ran his finger down the spine of the log and proclaimed, “Read this.”
12:31 pm: Guard sleeping on sofa in apartment 1136.
Liam grabbed the field glasses and turned them on the apartment window in question. A mannequin couple, per usual, was entwined in eternal coitus on the wire-framed bed. A broad mirror along one wall afforded a view into a blind corner of the same room where a uniformed individual, with eyes shut, slumped on a couch.
Because two opposing guards were on duty at all times (and each guarding against the defection of the other as much as minding the store), it was inconceivable that the dozing comrade was simply being ignored. The folds in his thick coat indicated no breathing, so it was reasonable to ask, “Is he dead? Did his partner shoot him?”
David speculated, “Perhaps it’s suicide.”
“There’s no disruption to the room. No hint of violence.”
“Some people walk into death like a well lit room, with calm deliberation,” replied the speculator.
Liam complained, “I’ve seen too many mannequins through these binoculars to distinguish them with certainty from dead bodies.”
David had been hours thinking over it, and ruminated. “I knew a guy who lived in Japan for a while. He visited Aokigahara Forest at the base of Mount Fuji, which is a popular destination for those contemplating suicide. Some people, of course, never return from there, while others seek resolve through the pilgrimage, or resolution to some other end. Those who hesitate on their journey take rolls of yellow tape and mark their progress into the forest by wrapping trees. If one does not intend to return, there is no need for a trail of breadcrumbs.
My friend took tape, and feared he would run out of it before he made up his mind. What decided things for him was, after several hours of hiking, and losing most of the daylight to the mountain, he came on the body of someone who hung himself, with difficulty, from a low tree limb. More than the horror of the scene was its irony: By this stage, my friend’s indecisiveness placed him too high on the ridge, where the trees were smaller at that elevation. The amount of energy expended to reach them did not leave him enough energy to deal with the logistics of small, inadequate trees. It would have been less a matter of employing gravity and body weight to finish the job, and more a matter of strangling himself by his own hand. He would pass out before he succeeded in ending his life. Staring into this dead man’s face, my friend realized it possessed a degree of composure and commitment to killing one’s self that he did not have.”
The balance of the relieving observer’s attention remained on the reflection during this morbid account. The mirror’s slackness, by his determination, seemed unusually generous, as if the hanging wire supporting it was loosened to create greater tilt. A nearly full view of the floor in front of the sofa was captured, and the most prominent feature on it was the incapacitated guard’s bare feet.
Liam pressed his own hypothesis. “The uniform is a poor fit. We might be looking at a homeless man who happened on the location, found guard clothes in a closet, and decided to camp out. After all, the whole point at Hotel Pyongyang is to lure people in like a roach motel.”
The other grumbled, “It would take considerable effort for anyone, deranged or compos mentis, to get anywhere on this terrain without shoes. This guy’s been parked on that sofa for at least eighteen hours. Given how punctual the Koreans are about rearranging the mannequins by the Kama Sutra playbook, no one has even bothered to feather dust him.”
“The readjustment in the mirror raises questions,” injected Liam. “He is not being ignored.”
David was not convinced of the mirror’s tampering, but, on hearing the confident declaration, left his replacement with his own interpretation. Smugly he commented from the doorway, “Maybe the Koreans realized you’re an artist, and that you’ve been sketching the filles de joie for your improvement. They want to offer you a more challenging subject.”
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