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about him.
    He went back to his house and faked being his regular brilliant self.
    At night he couldn’t sleep. He considered stabbing himself with his father’s ­nose-hair scissors, drinking laundry detergent mixed with ­Kool-Aid. His goodbye note would have to be read at his funeral. He scouted the house. In the kitchen he saw his father at the table without the lights on. His face was veiled with shadows, and in front of him was a tidy pyramid of unopened beer cans. Hemust have been carrying heavy equipment all day; he rubbed at his shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise. There was something ruined about his posture, like the brick remains of a demolished building. His father didn’t notice ­Mark—he wanted very much to be noticed. Maybe he should give his father a hug and cheer him up the way his mother seemed so simply, so foolishly, to respond to Mark, but his father and he had never been that way with each other; there had always been this politeness that made Mark feel as if his father were training to be a father and he were training to be his son. He was afraid of the way his father’s face shrank into a despairing mask, as if this were his true face, and not the quiet man who was always laughing at his mother’s plans and at the universe. He started tiptoeing back to his room.
    His father looked up at Mark’s first step. His father ­smiled—or tried to ­smile. “This is what happens when Omma doesn’t send the boys to bed.”
    “Appa, what were you doing outside?”
    His father cracked open a can. “I miss my family.”
    He meant the family he had had in North Korea that seemed more important to him than Mark, and they weren’t even here.
    “Tell the story about how I almost died,” Mark said.
    It was his favorite story, the one about how his mother and he had escaped the truck returning them to the North Korean border, where death awaited him; the North Korean authorities prized pure Korean bloodlines and despised babies born from Chinese men. But after a car crash and a sympathetic local’s help, they had escaped. His parents had later met in China, walked across the entire country, finally carrying Mark through the jungles of Laos with no maps, no compass, just a route in their headsthey had memorized. It was a good story because it was a happy story.
    His father gestured to the chair beside him, which relieved Mark enormously. Except his father said, “It’s wrong how we pretend we keep going forward.”
    “But we
are
going forward,” Mark said. “Tomorrow isn’t today and today isn’t yesterday.”
    The silence in the room spread and became part of the vast black penumbra outside the window, where danger lived; he wanted to find shelter in his father’s arms, but the darkness of his father’s face was no friendlier than the darkness outside.
    Finally his father said, “People think an exterminator is a terrible job. At church they keep trying to find me better work, but this is really all right with me. You know why, Myeongseok?”
    Mark couldn’t think of a single valid reason for choosing face–to–face contact with a cockroach, an insect that could stay alive for over two weeks
after
it had been beheaded. A fact he wished he didn’t know.
    “It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. You fight the termites, the rats, the ants, you pretend that with your uniform and goggles and respirator and chemicals you’re in control, though you know the entire time you’re going nowhere. It’s what we do every day, pretend we’re going somewhere.”
    His voice dipped so Mark could no longer hear his father muttering.
    Late each night Mark began getting up for a glass of milk. But each time he stole to the kitchen, hoping not to see his father, there he would be in the dark, his ear turned upward, listening to the silence.
    In June summer vacation began. His parents were at work and Mark was supposed to be at a math day camp funded by the Korean Presbyterian church his mother