The Kettle
The first night she made the stew, the window opened at seven exactly, and Sunhee had been ready for hours: table wiped, good apron, the pot already warm.
Haeun’s voice came through the small speaker propped against the salt jar, and it was so sudden and so much like the child standing in this kitchen at seven o’clock waiting for dinner that Sunhee laughed out loud before she said anything at all.
“Tell me,” she said.
So Haeun told her. She was twenty-nine years old and a mission specialist in geology, and she talked about the drill core as if it were a relative: the third meter had gone gray where nobody expected gray, and she had spent her whole shift arguing with a spectrometer about it. Sunhee understood perhaps one word in six. She did not mind. She had not called to understand. She had called to hear.
When Sunhee spoke, she spoke for a while, and then she stopped, because the silence was not empty and she had been told it would not be empty. She put the kettle on, because her hands needed something to do, and she stood at the stove with her back to the little speaker.
The water had just begun to think about boiling when Haeun answered the first thing she had said.
It was the joke of the evening, that the reply beat the kettle. Sunhee poured the tea anyway, both cups, one for the speaker. She did not fill the silence after that. She spoke, she waited. The answer came back to a sentence she had already moved on from. Nineteen minutes, and then the line went quiet for the length of a phone call nobody answers.
The only condition Sunhee had set at the departure, she said it at the gate with her hands perfectly still, was that she would be awake for every window. Not a phone call a week. Every window. Her daughter had said, Yes, Eomma, and then went away for good, and the condition was the only thing Sunhee had carried home from Incheon in her coat pocket.
“You’ll ruin yourself,” Jiyeon said, at the birthday lunch the following spring, when the family had gathered at her apartment and Sunhee had to leave the table. But that comes later.
For the first sols she kept the alarm, seven o’clock, same as always. Then she noticed that seven o’clock was no longer seven o’clock. The window had opened at 7:04. Then 7:08. She moved the alarm to 7:04 to be early, and the window was late anyway, and she lay in the dark understanding that she had made an error in the wrong direction.
Haeun had explained it once, patiently, in short complete sentences that assumed nothing, and that was how she explained everything now.
“A day here is twenty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds,” she said. “So every day I get up, our clock has gone thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds ahead of yours. Your evening arrives forty minutes later than it did the night before. That’s all it is. It’s just a longer day.”
“Just a longer day,” Sunhee said.
“It’s a good day,” Haeun said. “It’s a very long good day.”
So Sunhee set the alarm to whatever the window had been the night before plus a margin, and then she stopped setting it altogether and went to bed when the window ended. Simplest, and it worked, right up until the drift walked the window into four in the morning.
The auction at Jagalchi had been hers for nineteen years. Night auction, the bidding clock, the fish that had to be sold before the light came up, because at four in the morning a buyer can see yesterday in the gills. She had held badge 2119 since she was thirty-nine years old and she could dress in the dark for it.
On the sol the window opened at 4:14 she took the call in the alley behind the loading dock, coat over her nightgown, breath hanging, the speaker pressed to her ear so she could hear over the compressor, and when she came back in the first crates had already gone past. On the sol it opened at 3:34 she did the same. On the sol it opened at 4:53 she missed the start of the bidding entirely, standing out there waiting for a reply about a rock.
Mr. Ryu did not raise his voice. He looked at the roster and said, “How many hours do you need to keep?”
She needed the hours the window did not fall in. He gave her three days a week and took the rest off the board, and the women she had worked beside for nineteen years said nothing at all. Not one of them asked her why.
She went home and wrote the week on the calendar by the door. Wednesday, 7:41. Thursday, 8:20. Friday, 9:00. Forty minutes later every night, or thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds if you wanted to be honest about it, which Sunhee did and nobody in Busan had any use for. Her handwriting going around and around the little squares.
Then the window reached the morning, and that was the grandmother.
Okja was eighty-two and on Tuesday and Friday she sat in a chair in the dialysis unit on Dong-nae with the blood going out of her and back in, four hours, and she did not care one word about Mars. She cared that Nurse Ko was kind and that the vending machine still had the good plum drink. She cared about the chair by the window at nine, when she woke up from the first hour, which she always did, and looked.
On the sol the window opened at 8:51, Sunhee could not be in two places, and she asked the unit if Okja’s slot could move to seven. They moved it. She asked again two weeks later, for a slot at ten-thirty, and they moved it again, and Nurse Ko said, in the gentle voice people use for a woman who has clearly lost her mind, “Unni, there are other people on this schedule,” and the third time they said no, and the sol kept its appointment.
Because Sunhee had stopped going to the auction in the mornings, the mornings were now hers, so she was the one who took her mother to the moved slot at seven. And on the Friday the window opened at 9:31 she was in the chair by the window holding a plum drink. The speaker in her coat pocket played nineteen minutes of her daughter into the linoleum. Okja slept through the first hour, as she always had, and did not wake up and look.
The machine threw a pressure alarm near the second hour and they ran it slow and finished late, and Okja, in the wheelchair afterward, said only that the plum drink machine was broken, which it was not, and Sunhee never told her anything was the matter.
Jiyeon was fifty-four and had stayed, which is what the middle daughter does. She took the grandmother to the other Friday. She cooked. She was the one who picked up the slack and she resented it personally and continuously, a stone in her own shoe, and she was not wrong.
“Ask her,” Sunhee said to the calendar, meaning her sister, meaning the whole architecture of the family.
“She’s not here,” Jiyeon said. “We are.”
The birthday was Jiyeon’s, and the whole family gathered at noon at the apartment in Seo-gu, and on that sol the window opened at 12:09. Sunhee lasted four minutes at the table. Then she took her coat and her speaker out to the stairwell and sat on the concrete step with her knees up, talking to her daughter about a gray rock while inside the soup went cold and her sister’s children sang, and when she came back in, Jiyeon was cutting the cake without her.
“Call me when you’re on Earth time,” Jiyeon said, and did not look up.
Three days later Sunhee handed in the badge.
Mr. Ryu took it, badge 2119, and turned it over in his hand, a stone he had been shown before.
“Nineteen years,” he said.
“Nineteen years,” she said.
“You’re quitting for a phone call.”
She had a speech prepared. She had prepared it on the walk down, going over the words so she would not cry in the office of the man who had given her every shift she ever wanted. In the end she said, “It’s not a phone call. It’s a person.” Which was worse. He nodded slowly, decided she had gone soft, and let her go kindly.
On the thirty-sixth sol the window opened at 6:45.
Sunhee was standing at the stove with her coat still on. She looked at the clock above the stove. The little screen on the speaker. The calendar with its handwriting going around the squares. Six forty-five. Fifteen minutes short of where it started, because the lap never closed exactly. Thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds does not go into twenty-four hours without a remainder. The remainder was fifteen minutes. She did not make anything that night. She took her coat off and sat down at the table with her hands flat on it and let the window happen and end, and after she went to bed at seven in the evening by the stove clock, and did not think of it as the wrong time at all.
There were eleven months in which the window behaved, more or less. It came late sometimes, because the antenna was scheduled like weather: two sols in the second month it did not come at all, and on the third it came short, six minutes, Haeun speaking quickly with her eyes off somewhere else, and then gone, and no explanation owed to anyone in a kitchen in Busan. Sunhee took what she got. She had good weeks and bad weeks, and the good weeks were very good, because Haeun had begun to tell her about the drill core as family news, and Sunhee was answering the questions before Haeun asked them.
Okja had fallen. Not badly: eighty-two, in the kitchen, onto her hip. She was fine, sitting up drinking tea by the time Sunhee got there, but Sunhee had been frightened for forty minutes in a taxi and she wanted to say so. So at the window she said it: the fear, the taxi, the tea, the hip, Nurse Ko’s phone number, everything in the wrong order because she was frightened still.
Then she put the kettle on and sat out the silence, as she always did, because the silence was not empty.
Fourteen minutes later Haeun’s reply arrived, cheerful, about the tea, answering the second thing she had said. It went on for three minutes. Sunhee sat very still listening to her daughter be happy about tea on a Thursday when the fear had already been over for an hour and could not be passed along, because you cannot interrupt a delay, cannot say Yes, but, cannot correct a sentence that was sent before the world changed. She said it all again the next sol instead, in the calm voice, and Haeun said, “That sounds frightening, Eomma,” and it was not frightening by then, and they both pretended.
After that she edited herself before speaking. Not for honesty. For timing. She put the frightening things at the front of the nineteen minutes and the small things at the back, so that by the time her daughter’s answers came back, the frightening things would still be the right size.
Then came the conjunction, in the thirteenth month, when the two worlds swing around so the sun sits between them, and nothing is said across that gap for two weeks.
They had warned them. There had been a briefing, apparently, months earlier, in a community hall, and Sunhee had not gone, because she had been working the auction that week, before everything. So she learned about it on the morning it arrived, when the window did not open.
She waited the nineteen minutes with the kettle on. She waited afterward as well, sitting in the good apron, until the stove clock said eight and the speaker said nothing, and she thought, The antenna. It is scheduled like weather.
The next night the same. On the third night she found the paper the agency had sent, folded in the drawer with the manuals, and read the word conjunction, and the dates, and the sentence about the moratorium, and she sat down at the kitchen table because her legs had decided on it without asking. Fourteen days. No window, no voice, nothing owed.
She set the alarm anyway.
She set it to 8:26, where the window would have been on that sol, and in the morning she wrote the next day’s time on the calendar in her going-around handwriting, and the next, all fourteen, forty minutes later each night, into a week that would have no window at all.
So she talked.
At 8:26 she put the speaker on the table and she told her daughter about the auction women, about Mr. Ryu’s replacement who counted the crates twice, about Okja’s hip and the plum drink machine that was working again after all. Nineteen minutes. Then she sat out the silence without filling it, and the silence was exactly as empty as it had been when she did not know any better. She stayed at the table anyway until the stove clock turned over. Then she wrote tomorrow’s time and went to bed.
On the eighth night she found she had begun, without deciding to, doing it properly: she spoke, she stopped, she put the kettle on, she sat out the kettle. The water came up and went quiet. Nothing came after it. She drank the tea anyway, both cups, washed them, and went to bed.
On the eleventh night Jiyeon called.
“Are you all right?” her sister said. “Miso says you’ve been sitting in your kitchen talking to a jar every night.”
“She’s listening,” Sunhee said.
“She’s not listening, Unni. The paper says the sun is in the way. Nobody is listening. Nobody can be.”
“Two weeks,” Sunhee said.
“Two weeks,” Jiyeon said. Her voice went heavy. “Come and eat on Sunday. Bring the jar if you have to.”
On the fourteenth night Sunhee set the alarm for 10:14 and went to bed with the speaker on the pillow beside her. She had not done that since Haeun was small and afraid of the dark. She did not sleep much, and she did not tell anybody.
The window opened at 10:14.
She heard the line wake up, that small catch of sound, and she said, “I’m here.” Then the wait, the long one now, near the far end of the year, twenty minutes or so. In that wait she pictured her daughter on the other side of it, sitting with a speaker saying I’m here into an empty hab, fourteen nights running.
Then the reply came, and the voice was different.
Not broken. Careful. Haeun spoke in short complete sentences that assumed nothing, in the tone of someone choosing her words for a person who could not interrupt, and she had been doing it for a long time, long enough that it had stopped being a choice and become how she talked. She had been a Mars person for a year.
“I kept the kettle too,” Haeun said, at the end of it, and Sunhee laughed and cried at once in her own kitchen at ten at night. She said, “Of course you did, you’re my daughter,” and the line went quiet for the length of a phone call nobody answers.
After that the year went on in its ordinary way, which is to say it went around. Okja’s hip healed and she went back to Tuesdays and Fridays at nine. Sunhee took the windows again, standing in whatever room she was in, and the handwriting on the calendar kept its going-around. In the second month after the conjunction Mr. Ryu’s replacement was replaced by Mr. Ryu, who called to ask if she wanted the badge back. She said no thank you. He said, “Your loss,” kindly. She said, “Yes,” which was the first honest thing she had said to him in a year.
Then the lap was coming round again, and Sunhee counted it, because by now she counted everything. She saw that on a particular sol in the middle of the month the window would open at 6:45 and on the sol after it at 7:24, and that was the corner.
She went to the market in the afternoon and bought what the first night had had, because she had written it down, in the same going-around hand, on the back of the calendar: the short rib, the potato, the soybean paste she had let sit out too long that first evening and had used anyway, and had then spent nineteen minutes being teased about by her daughter.
The kitchen smelled as it had that first night.
She put the good apron on. At 6:45 the window opened, and Haeun was there. She told her about the drill core for a while. Then Sunhee told her about the stew, ingredient by ingredient, in the order she had done them. There was the wait, the short one now, the year having swung back toward its nearest, three minutes and change. She put the kettle on while she waited, out of habit, out of thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds of habit, and the reply came before the water did. Her daughter laughed at the stove clock, as she used to, and said, “Same time tomorrow, Eomma,” and Sunhee said, “Same time tomorrow.”
Afterward the line went quiet. She sat at the table and ate. The stew was the stew. The voice was not.
She washed the pot and the cup and the speaker and stood at the sink with the towel in her hands. Then she did what she had promised herself she would not do, and what she had promised herself she would do.
She reached over and looked at the alarm.
4:14, it said, from a sol in another month, from a week when it did not matter. The little screen, content with its own bad arithmetic.
She picked the speaker up off the table and set it beside the salt jar, where it lived, and she wiped the counter around it, and she left the alarm alone.