The Surrendered

As Hector changed into coveralls, Jung grunted, eyeing him, rooting around in his trousers to scratch and rearrange. He let out a sharp fart before turning over and going back to sleep. He was already snoring when Hector opened the janitor’s closet where he kept the tools of his trade. The man was a lower god of indolence. Hector noisily hefted the heavy commercial vacuum (Jung didn’t stir) and rode up the elevator to the second floor. It was just after nine in the morning and the place was empty of activity save in the Korean restaurant on the mezzanine, which was open twenty-four hours; a lone diner spooned methodically at a half-dozen small plates of vegetables and a stoneware casserole of steaming soup. A waitress sat two tables away, robotically folding utensils within cloth napkins. When she looked up and saw him, her body relaxed and she smiled, waving him in. Hector suddenly realized he hadn’t eaten-not since yesterday’s lunch-but he wasn’t hungry yet and made a gesture to her to say that he would work first.

He set himself to vacuuming, pushing the machine back and forth on the mezzanine where the carpeting wasn’t frayed and could get caught up. In most spots it was worn down to the webbing; one could see the poured-concrete floor beneath it. The mall itself was similarly decrepit, the linoleum overlay by the entrance scratched and buckling, and the central elevator rickety-sounding and dangerously temperamental, its doors sometimes opening just before reaching the right level. The entire inside was painted in cheap off-white paint, save for the ceiling above the central open well, which was a slightly different shade of the old color, somewhat duller, where the painters couldn’t (or hadn’t bothered trying to) reach. The owner didn’t care if the place was in presentable, or even half-presentable, shape, as the tenants clearly valued most the modest rents. Nor did the poor condition of the building seem to dissuade the steady foot traffic of the Koreans and Chinese and the few non-Asians who shopped there and ate at the restaurants. Despite the state of the mall, most of the goods in the shops weren’t inexpensive, certainly nothing Hector could ever afford-knockoff designer clothing and shoes and home and car audio equipment with brand names he didn’t recognize. There was also a hair salon, an Asian video store, a toy shop, a bakery, a copy shop, a dentist who was also an acupuncturist, and a tae kwon do studio, as well as the karaoke bar and the restaurant.

In the time that Hector had worked in the mall, there had been what seemed to him an extremely high turnover of tenants, none except the restaurant remaining open for very long, and then even the restaurant changed ownership twice in the last few years. Jung had told him that it was because the tenants were often inexperienced business-people, immigrants who got onto a notion of selling some product they could import cheaply and easily, but rarely, it would turn out, cheaply and easily enough to compete with the stores at the large malls nearby. The dentist did reasonably well, as did the bakery, which sold sweet, buttery breads and pastries filled with custards and sweet bean paste the customers couldn’t get anywhere else. But mostly the stores here were poorly pla

Before the incident with the boy soldier he had been a willing enough soldier in their war. Or maybe not their war exactly, but Mao’s war, or Truman’s, or someone else’s; it was a war that from the begi

With the war he saw it fully wide and dark and deep. But it wasn’t the usual rough awakening: he’d never been in thrall to the notion of hero. As a soldier he’d pictured himself not a savior, or some killing machine, but rather one of countless figures on the battlefield, just like the toy soldiers he played with all through his youth; each mini-statuette was formed in one of several poses, as either a prone shooter or a bayonet-wielding assaulter or a marcher, Hector seeing himself as the last of these, the ones the other boys didn’t care for and would trade to him at ten to one for the others. He was captivated by the swarm of great numbers, the feel of them bunched in his hands like a massing of tiny bones. On the chipped, painted porch of his parents’ house he’d line them up in neat rows, the marchers, gritty-faced, pushing on, their rifles shouldered, and though many in the front would perish before the shooters and bayonets, he knew their flood would prevail.

Now, as he put the vacuum back in the closet and began filling the rolling bucket, Jung woke up and stood and stretched, yawning wide as a lion before sitting back down. As if he’d slept with a lighter and cigarette in his hand, he instantly lit one up. Hector well knew the pattern of the man’s Saturdays; Jung would play a heavily wagered round at the municipal golf course at Overpeck and then eat and drink and gamble the rest of the night with his playing partners and maybe visit some bar girls at one of the Korean nightclubs in town. In between, when he could get to a phone, he’d bet on football games, baseball games, basketball in the winter. He was in his mid-thirties and married and had young children, but a few weeks ago his wife had kicked him out of their apartment in Palisades Park, fed up with his womanizing and chronic absence and gambling and his unrepentant laziness, which was in fact his core charm. There was an admirable self-comfort in Jung’s ma