The Haedong Registry occupied the top eleven floors of a tower on Nam Pier, and the people who worked in it wore name-badges on retractable cords and ate lunch at their desks. That was what shocked him. He had expected incense, carved doors, a sense of weight. What he got was a lobby with a rubber plant, a security desk where a young man was eating kimbap out of foil, and a lift that played a soft electronic tune in a key designed to calm the owner of a pension.

Floor Nine smelled of carpet and printer toner. A receptionist with a headset and a kind face asked him to sign the visitor book, and he did, with his left hand, in the sloping, ordinary writing of a stranger. Beside the book stood a bowl of boiled sweets. He took one. The wrapper crackled very loudly in a very quiet room.

"The Director will see you now, Mr. Ryu."

He was not alone in the corridor. Along the wall, on moulded plastic chairs, sat five other people holding the same cream envelope: a woman in her forties in a bus driver's uniform, a boy of maybe twenty with headphones around his neck, a heavyset man in a suit that did not fit, two women who looked like sisters and held hands without noticing. Nobody spoke. Every few minutes the door opened, a name was read, and someone went in. The people who came out were never the same as the people who had gone in. The bus driver came out smiling too widely, clutching a sheet headed *PLACEMENT OFFER*, and said to no one, "Free dental." The boy with the headphones came out and walked straight to the lift without looking at anybody.

Seon-ho watched the sheets. They were all the same colour. He did the arithmetic that came to him whenever he saw a pile of paper: six people from his own clinic year, all zeros, all invited on the same morning. Not a calibration error. A harvest.

He had spent the last hour in a corridor chair thinking about the goose. It had begun as a discipline. It had become something nearer to a prayer. The ladle in Hwang's kitchen, its handle carved by some patient craftsman into a long curve of neck and a small, put-upon head; the shabby gloss on the beak where a thousand thumbs had held it. He thought about the goose until there was a goose-shaped silence where his fear had been. Then he followed the receptionist through a door.

It was a bright room with a long window onto the harbour. There was a plain table with three chairs, a glass of water, a tray of copper styluses laid in a row like surgical instruments. Reader Han Soo-ah stood by the wall with a clipboard and the poised, expressionless face of a woman about to witness a thing she does not like.

And at the head of the table sat a man in a grey cardigan, stirring a cup of tea.

Kang Tae-rim was fifty-eight and looked like a retired schoolmaster. He had rounded shoulders, thin white hair brushed carefully across a high forehead, and half-moon glasses on a cord. His cardigan had a button missing at the cuff. He rose when Seon-ho entered, with a small apologetic motion of the shoulders, as if standing were an imposition on them both.

"Mr. Ryu. How kind of you to come. I am so sorry about the stylus. Truly. A calibration error of that sort is an embarrassment to everyone." His voice was light and dry and extraordinarily gentle. "Please sit. Take as long as you like. Would you care for a biscuit?"

"No, thank you, sir."

"Wise. They are very stale." He sat again. "Soo-ah will administer the test, and I will merely watch, if you will permit it. I am a nosy old man. I find that watching is my one remaining pleasure."

Seon-ho sat. The chair was cold under him. In the window behind Kang, a container ship drifted through the haze, slow and enormous, like a building that had decided to go on holiday.

Han lifted a stylus and said, in a neutral voice, "This is the same instrument, recalibrated. It will touch the sternum. You may feel a slight pressure. Please try to breathe normally."

The copper was cold through his shirt. He breathed. He did not think about the exam or the man at the end of the table or his mother or the margin line. He thought about the neck of a goose.

Nothing happened. The stylus did not warm. It sat against his breastbone like a coin on a corpse.

"Zero," said Han. "Confirmed."

"Thank you, Soo-ah." Kang had not moved. He was looking at Seon-ho over the half-moons with the benevolent attention of a doctor listening to a chest. "And now, Mr. Ryu, if you will forgive me, the other thing. I read. It is not a procedure. It is more of a... courtesy, a look. One does not like to dismiss a result without confirming it with one's own eyes."

"Of course," said Seon-ho.

It was like standing in front of a lamp. A mild, cool, even light, without heat, and utterly without hurry. He did not feel it on his skin. He felt it in the roots of his attention, a pressure like a finger drawn very gently along a page, checking for dents. He saw the ladle. He saw the beak. He saw, very distinctly, the green rust that had formed where the goose met the pot.

The finger paused. It moved on. It came back.

*There is nothing to read,* he thought, in a clean small voice that was not quite his own. *There is a goose.*

"How interesting," said Kang.

Seon-ho did not move.

"Tell me, Mr. Ryu," the Director said, quite pleasantly. "When I look at you, I see something quite unusual. I see a very *clean* furnace. Reader Han will correct me, but in thirty years I have seen four thousand dry children, and they are usually cracked. Scarred. A dry furnace looks like a dry well, with a little rubble at the bottom. Yours is swept." He smiled. "May I ask what you were thinking about?"

The room contracted. Han's pen had stopped on the clipboard. Beyond the glass, the container ship sounded a long note from a long way off.

There is a kind of lie that cannot be improved by being cleverer. It can only be made smaller. Seon-ho looked at the Director and said, with a total lack of expression, "A ladle."

"A ladle."

"My friend has a ladle. The handle's a goose. It's ugly. I've been thinking about it since Monday, and I can't stop. I think it's the beak."

There was a pause of about two seconds. Han coughed into her fist. It might have been a laugh. The Director's eyebrows rose a little. And then, to Seon-ho's astonishment, he laughed too, a soft, dry, delighted laugh, like paper being folded.

"Hwang's ladle," he said. "I know the one. He has had it since the nineties. I once asked to buy it, and he said it was not for sale, and then he said that Confucius had owned one just like it." He took off his glasses and wiped them on his cardigan. "A wonderful old fraud. Is he well?"

The lamp-light shifted. Seon-ho kept breathing.

"I eat there," he said. "The soup's good."

"I am sure it is." Kang replaced his glasses. When he looked up, the amusement was gone, replaced by a deep, sorrowing courtesy. "Mr. Ryu, I am afraid I have wasted your morning. The result stands. Dry. A very unusual specimen of the type, but dry nevertheless. I am so sorry. The Registry will certainly send a letter of apology."

He had been braced for a trap. He had not been braced for relief, and the relief arrived so strongly that his vision swam.

"I appreciate that, sir."

"I would, however, like to make you an offer." Kang folded his hands. "I understand you have a gift for documents. Mr. Tak tells me that you read a consent form more carefully than most of our lawyers. The Registry has a Records Department. It is dull work. Filing, verifying, restoring. It would pay twice what Mr. Jeong pays you, with benefits. And," the Director added, with the smallest of pauses, "it would be a great help with your mother's expenses. A staff discount. We have an arrangement with Sunrise Care."

Seon-ho heard the offer and, beneath it, the sound of a door being held open for him. He thought of the form. *Persons of blood or household.* He thought of a letter that stopped in the middle of a line.

*The man who is going to offer to help you is*

"It's generous," he said carefully. "May I have the terms in writing? I'd like to read them."

"Of course. Every word." Kang looked pleased, in the way a teacher looks pleased with a pupil who has asked the right question. "I will have them sent. Take your time. Take a week. Take a month. We are in no hurry. The Registry," he said, "is very good at waiting."

He rose, and so did Seon-ho. They shook hands across the table. The Director's palm was warm and slightly damp, a kind man's hand, and for one second, just one, Seon-ho felt the lamp-light pass over him again, like a thumb across a pane of glass.

"A last thing," said Kang, still holding his hand. "If you should happen to see your father in the next few weeks, I wonder if you would give him my regards."

The floor was perfectly still.

"My father's dead, sir," said Seon-ho.

"Of course he is." The Director released his hand. He picked up his tea. "Forgive an old man. I am forever getting the tenses mixed up."