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  “Student Council President,” the old man said, “I trust you have all our affairs in order—the treasury, the attendance sheet, the list of prizes that my students will win someday.”

  Moon responded with a deep bow. When Mister Suguk continued on to his desk in the corner of the room, I was left to linger alone by the door. I wondered if I should step forward and introduce myself as a new foreign exchange student. But Moon, sensing my unease, turned to me with a warm 【创建和谐家园】ile. Inordinately prepared to treasure whatever he was about to say, I swept every thought off the table of my brain.

  “Hello, Miss Oseol,” he said.

  I stopped breathing. Meeting as we were for the second time, I was now someone he recognized, which meant that he’d possibly looked forward to seeing me. I wanted to tell him my real name so that I could hear him say it. But the girl called out from the back of the room before I could open my mouth.

  “This lady followed us all the way from the dining room,” she said. “I didn’t have the heart to tell her to go away. I could 【创建和谐家园】ell it, that oily dissatisfaction with her own life—”

  “Maehwa,” Moon said. “Stop it.”

  “I like it so much when you give me commands,” Maehwa said, shutting her eyes. “I don’t want to think for myself anymore.”

  I blinked in shock. They were using the informal register. Even their intonation had changed—quicker, mercurial. It was a manner of speaking I’d observed among high schoolers on the subway in Seoul, huddled together with the feverish secrecy of a coven.

  “If you would prefer me to leave,” I blurted, “just say so.”

  I cringed. I was resorting to clichés in my state of confusion.

  “No, stay,” Maehwa said. “I’m curious to know how it feels to be someone like you. To think you really know someone when you don’t know them at all.”

  “But I feel like I’ve known Moon my whole life—”

  “I could almost find that beautiful,” she said dryly. “You know, my father and I had all the time in the world to get to know each other. Even so, nothing but blood connected us for years. A lot had to happen before we could know each other. I had to lose my name; I had to become someone else entirely. So for you to say that you know Moon—well, that’s frankly outrageous to me.”

  At that moment, Mister Suguk clapped for everyone’s attention. Moon sat down in the first row, but I headed for the back of the room and cowered by the wall, consumed by misery. What was this “a lot” that brought two people together, if not blood, nor shared experience across time? To my disturbance, Maehwa seemed to be suggesting that whatever it was, she’d experienced this “a lot” not only with her father but with Moon as well.

  The lesson began. Mister Suguk pointed at the map hanging over the chalkboard. It was a cartographical monstrosity: he’d sliced a world atlas into dozens of vertical strips and arranged them into a new order. The result was a spastic composite of blue and green. I could identify no country, no ocean. Gone were the patiently winding curves of a bay, artless blocks of land. Nothing sprawled. Sometimes a few slivers of green pieced themselves together across the strips with jerky fortitude, but they were inevitably cut short by blue.

  “When one lives deeply, the world looks like this,” Mister Suguk said. “What good is geography if it prioritizes the immediacy of physical experience at the expense of everything else? Your pen pals are proof that you are not just here. You are also where they are. And they, in turn, are where you are. Student Council President, I would like for you to read first today.”

  Moon stood up at his desk with an abused-looking piece of paper, its edge frayed from having been roughly torn out of a notebook. He had to lay it flat on his desk and 【创建和谐家园】ooth it out before he could begin.

  “Dear Moon,” he read aloud, “I am sending you a boomerang. Don’t ask me where in Australia I live. I don’t remember the name of my town. Work has been terribly busy. How I wish the restaurant would shut down! There are so many other things that could take its place: horse stable, boxing gym, observation tower. Pick your favorite. I will make sure your choice exists by the time you visit. In return, you can help me complete my remaining hours of community service at the youth center. The orphans will like you so much better than me. You asked if Australians eat or dance or think or breathe in any special way. Nothing comes to mind, I’m afraid! Except the boomerang. You better not send it back. In this particular case, I do not want the boomerang to work …”

  Moon read to the end with utmost seriousness, sometimes pausing after a line that struck me as no more significant than the lines preceding. It was a strange letter, intimate and characterless at once. Personal details were so few as to be conspicuous. I glanced over at Maehwa—she was examining her nails with a 【创建和谐家园】ile.

  “And the boomerang?” Mister Suguk said. “Where is it?”

  “Oh,” Moon said, looking around as though he’d misplaced the gift. “It’s gone …”

  “You’re in luck,” Mister Suguk said sternly. “I would’ve snapped it in half over my knee. What do I always say? No souvenirs. No objects should be flying in the air between you and your correspondent.”

  Now it was Maehwa’s turn. She rose to her feet with a crisp sheet of paper densely packed with black script, front and back. I recognized the handwriting immediately.

  * * *

  THIS WAS WHAT Moon had written Maehwa:

  “To my sister of the heart—no, don’t tell me your name. We never need to be introduced. One day we will meet, and if I am so sure of it, then why not go ahead and assume that we already have. I take the future, and I implant it into the arm of the now. No, don’t send me your portrait either. Stay ghostly. Then, you are everywhere …

  “You ask for news. I have a swimming teacher. I’m not engaged to her. It’s not like that; it never is. The story is always one of disjuncture, not of a joyful coming together! Like my body and water. Swimming does not come naturally to me. I have been compelled to walk. I can’t make a single appointment that isn’t immediately canceled, so I follow around strangers who appear fashionably busy, and I make my shadow interlock with theirs in painless combat. My swimming teacher was no exception. I knew only the back of her head for a long time. I was in the midst of following her one day when she spun around on her heels and said she consented to being my teacher. I hadn’t even asked. I didn’t need to. She’d known from the weariness of my footsteps that I’d grown sick of my achievements on land.

  “I want you to have a clear picture of my swimming teacher. She’s not a pretty woman. She has a long crooked spine, but it is marvelous at helping her wind through the water like an eel. One of her eyes is much larger than the other. But she sees less out of that eye. The parts of her that are supposed to match never do. When she puts her hands on her lover in the dark, he screams out in fright, believing there to be a third person in the room. Only her two front teeth, the big ones, are identical. They are white like headstones. She 【创建和谐家园】iles a cemetery at her loved ones, of which there are few. As you might imagine, she prefers the murky lethargy of life underwater. She’s rather good-humored for someone who can’t get anything right on land. She almost dies from laughter as she tells me that she’s running out of time, that it’s painful to be so useless at her own tremendous existence, to be the worst example of herself.

  “Our first swimming lesson was the last. She took me to the biggest lake in the region. It was past midnight. She stood on the shore with a samovar chugging at her feet and pointed at the lake. ‘Get in there,’ she barked. She hadn’t told me anything about how I should move my arms or legs. But I’d always promised her my unabiding obedience. So I waded into the lake. When I was up to my shoulders, I turned around and awaited further instructions. ‘And?!’ my teacher cried out from shore. I threw myself backward. I opened my eyes—the water was black like ink under the moonless sky. I waited to come upon the ability to swim. But I could feel myself starting to sink. How strange, I thought, to have been capable of dying all this time. So then I waited to touch ground and molder there. But this moment, too, would not come. With horror, I realized that I was in the midst of absolute suspension, surrounded by water on all sides. The loneliness was so excruciating that it triggered my first moment of pain. I clawed at the water over my head, wanting something, anything at all, to change.

  “Then it happened. My body hit upon its perfect choreography of existence. I had never even known to consider the possibility of such a movement, yet at that moment I was certain I’d been waiting for it my entire life. The movement was not mine. I did not create it; it used me to birth itself. It happened to me with the force of violation. I was being given a second chance at life, to rush upon its terrain with the fresh knowledge that there existed an arrangement of my body in space wherein every one of my cells, bursting with health, was conscripted to truth—how could that not change everything, even the sight of a face I despised? And yet the price I would have to pay was the bludgeoning fact that I could never recreate this movement on land, in the midst of life.

  “I was not swimming. My teacher, I realized, did not teach swimming. Even now, I cannot say what it is my teacher teaches. I haven’t had a chance to ask her. When I crawled back to shore, she was gone …”

  After Maehwa was done reading, she continued gazing down at the letter, transfixed by the black script as though it were an optical illusion. Mister Suguk’s eyes were closed; I wondered if he was asleep. Moon hung his head, having endured every word like a 【创建和谐家园】all punishment.

  My hands were shaking uncontrollably. So Moon had been fantasizing about it, too—the dance that defied description, the move of my Moon dreams. After writing about it for months, carving out miles upon miles of my tunnel of imagination, I’d succeeded at making a break into his, creating a flow of secret knowledge between us. No one knew him like I did. This was no collaboration; this was collusion.

  But it was impossible to extricate my joy from the wet strands of my suffering. Moon had expressed, in concise poetry, what bound us together—but he saw me no less as a perfect stranger. The letter was there, consummate, the indisputable manifesto of our shared fantasy—and yet it wasn’t for me. In fact, an entirely different world would have to be built from scratch for Moon to write me such a letter. The irony was cruel. The proof of our connection sat deep inside his letter as if inside a glass box: nothing obscured my view of it, but I could not touch it, I could not claim it as my own.

  * * *

  I NEEDED SOMEONE to talk to. But the Caregiver had little attention to spare. She and Mister Goun were still in the dining room, though she was now helping him sort through a collection of family photographs, sprawled across the table in disorder. Noticing me at the door, she waved me over and explained that she’d given Mister Goun a photo album to fill with his favorite memories. There were also scissors, should he wish to “expunge” from his records anyone who’d hurt him beyond the possibility of forgiveness.

  The old man had a surprisingly rigorous system. He would set two pictures against each other and contemplate them for a long time, whereupon he took one and flung it to the ground with theatrical distaste. Then a new round of deliberations would ensue. The floor around him was littered with photographs, while only a handful remained on the table, fewer than would fill the album to completion.

  I observed the two pictures currently in competition. In the first, Mister Goun could be seen standing in a shoe factory with a giant banner bearing Chinese characters. There was nothing artis【创建和谐家园】 about the environs; I supposed he’d had to make certain concessions in his career. In the second, a young woman had her arms laced around Mister Goun as they stood under a trellis hanging with gourds. I recognized, to my shock, the Caregiver. She towered over Mister Goun in black heels. He was red in the face and portly. The two of them composed a single insouciant team and gave the impression of having deigned to step out of their dank lair of lovemaking for a few minutes.

  The Caregiver caught the expression on my face.

  “Don’t be sad for me,” she said. “I’m like a buried trauma. He might have forgotten me, but he’ll never exorcize me. He loves me more than he knows—”

  In one swift move, Mister Goun sent the second picture flying to the floor. The Caregiver leaned over to rescue it, then set it back on the table, ostensibly returning it for Mister Goun’s consideration.

  Here we were, I thought gloomily, the Caregiver and I, indefatigably following our distracted objects of affection around the house … All of a sudden, the frustration that had gathered in my heart since my arrival poured out in one epiphanic rush, and what took its place was radiant hope. Perhaps Moon, like Mister Goun, no longer remembered the person he loved most in the world. If this person was me, then perhaps, unable to bear the pain of his amnesia, I’d settled for a place among the faceless horde that adored Moon. Might this be why I’d always chafed at calling myself a fan? If so, the true source of my pain wasn’t that Moon would never get to know me, but that he’d forgotten he already did. I simply had to remind him. But how? How might I remind him of a past that even I, for all my conviction, couldn’t articulate?

  Mister Goun dispatched another victim to the floor. In the picture, he was standing in a parking lot so vast that it extended beyond the frame. The parking lot must have served a venue visited by thousands of people at once, like a soccer arena or a megachurch. But there wasn’t a single car in view. Mister Goun had his back to the camera but his face turned over his shoulder, hips twisting into decision—either to come back, or to go away forever.

  11. The Repairman

  AFTER THE CONCERT, Y/N BECOMES quiet and unexcitable. Her new hobby is taking apart old clocks. She finds them at antique markets all over Seoul. She is strict about bringing them home only one at a time; once, she’d made the mistake of bringing two, and the subtle discrepancy between their ticking had nearly driven her mad.

  When she gets home, she walks around her apartment with the clock, cradling it in her hands like a 【创建和谐家园】all bomb. At her desk, she painstakingly di【创建和谐家园】antles it as she squints through a loupe. She arranges its tiny metal components in neat rows across her desk. Y/N loves the moment when, upon the decisive extraction of a tooth-like bit, the clock stops ticking. A supernatural silence falls around her. When she sees her hands lying still upon her desk, she can almost believe that they belong to a photograph—that she has slipped out of time. She can’t imagine having a goal ever again.

  Days pass without food or sleep. Y/N is now lying on the floor, surrounded by hundreds of disemboweled clocks. The room is dark; it must be evening. All of a sudden, the door opens, and someone steps into the apartment. It’s a man carrying a toolbox. Y/N is too weak to do anything but watch as the man, without a word, steps over her body and proceeds to reassemble one clock after another. The room slowly fills with ticking of all kinds. The noise is growing torrential. The ticking is so multiple, so motley—dozens of cuckoo clocks among them—that it creates a single wash of noise.

  Time, of a sort, passes. The repairman leaves as silently as he came. Y/N notices only when it’s too late.

  Her heart is starting to come alive amidst the cacophony of unsynced time. The repairman has restored not the linear march of a single human life but a roaring cascade that is eternity itself, so encompassing that when she relaxes her vigilance, she doesn’t hear anything at all. The last time she felt this way was when she witnessed, between these same walls, Moon performing the dance move that defied description. In that moment, too, she glimpsed a sliver of eternity, a leakage from the mellifluous darkness encasing the visible world. Among the resuscitated clocks, she dreams of sending herself away, like a dove released, to that other realm. There she would be caught in the amber of her existence. She would never age again; she would forget her birthday.

  Y/N is finally strong enough to stand up. As she looks around the room, she realizes that her favorite clock is missing: a pocket watch that opens and shuts like a clam, as if to suggest there are moments when one should not know the time. The repairman has taken it with him. In the absence of its singular ticking, four clicks to a second, she hears herself being called.

  She packs a suitcase and leaves the apartment, her ears cocked for the pocket watch. She seeks quiet places, like chapels and landfills. Whenever a sparrow chitters neurotically in her proximity, she stamps a foot to make it fly away. She walks and walks, ending up in a city of staggering proportions, but, with the repairman nowhere to be seen, she keeps walking, and this city slowly becomes another city, which becomes yet another city, until Y/N, too exhausted to take another step, falls onto her back on the sidewalk. Her suitcase collapses next to her like an obliging sidekick. Y/N’s view of the blue sky is obliterated by brand-new apartment towers that have yet to be occupied …

  I put down my pen. I didn’t know what should come next.

  It seemed likely that Y/N would move from city to city in perpetuity. She would never find the repairman, yet she would never lose the conviction that he existed somewhere in the world to be found. And this conviction alone would mean everything. But there was also the chance, however slight, that as she lay there, at the feet of those apartment buildings, a single window would suddenly light up in one of their concrete flanks. Y/N would take the elevator high into the atmosphere and find the repairman waiting in an apartment furnished with nothing but a bed they must share. The rest of the building, all thirty floors, would be empty.

  I was struck by insight: it was imperative that Moon read my story. For here, in this notebook, was our lost history. Here, in these scenes, was the symbolic shadowplay of all that had already transpired between us. But the events to come after—they defied my imagination. What I did know was that in this unimaginable future, we would be together at last, away from the world, freed from its detrimental gravity. We would encounter each other in infinitude. We would shuck off our bodies and surge toward each other as souls. Together in our renunciation of reality, we would achieve what no fan and his star had ever achieved before: mutual universality, perfect love.

  * * *

  I TRIED THE kitchen. To my surprise, Moon was there, standing at the counter, back turned to me, cracking an egg into a glass bowl. I considered calling for him, but I couldn’t bear the sterility of using his name in such a functional way. In the hundreds of times I’d said his name before, not once had I said it to him directly, much less to crudely demand his attention. The syllable had always fit my mouth like a wistful sigh.

  “What are you making?” I asked.

  He turned around with a ready 【创建和谐家园】ile.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to know what cooking feels like.”

  The kitchen table had two chairs positioned on perpendicular sides, as if a couple who preferred the proximity of their bodies to a direct view of each other’s faces had just finished a meal. Moon and I sat down.

  “How can I help you, Miss Oseol?” he asked.

  I laid my notebook on the table, turned the cover, and pushed it toward him.

  “I would like for you to read something I wrote.”

  “But it’s in English,” he said, peering down at the first page.

  “You don’t need to understand every word. What’s important is to grasp the general idea. Take your time, I can wait.”

  To my pleasure, he picked up the notebook and began to read aloud. I relished the gaminess of his accent; it sounded impossible to fix. He paused when he came across the word Y/N. He tried pronouncing it as “yin,” but immediately reconsidered, settling instead on “why en.” Each time he uttered the abbreviation, I increasingly understood myself in the sound—the breathy insubstantiality of “why,” which was pulled down the throat by the density of “en.” He seemed to be asking “why” of my existence, “why” I was what I was.

  He turned a page and kept reading. But when Moon the character appeared at the bus stop, he broke off mid-sentence.

  “You wrote a story about me,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Now please keep reading.”

  But he flipped back to the first page and started over. This time, he read under his breath with impatience. Whereas earlier, he’d read aloud out of an instinctive desire to please, now he was reading to understand. On occasion, he spoke up to ask what a word meant. He’d assumed that Y/N stood for “Yes/No,” believing the slash to signify the protagonist’s fragmented sense of self. When I clarified that it stood for “Your Name,” he grew only more confused.

  “If I’m supposed to replace Y/N with my own name, then is this a story about me interacting with myself?” he asked. “And what about me could possibly remind you of a philosopher? I don’t know anything about philosophy.”

  Moon was now several pages into the story. Whenever his namesake appeared, his eyes flashed with pleasure and suspicion: “Who’s more realistic—me or him?” he asked. “Who leads the stranger life?” He kept waiting for the story to “get me right,” as if this would prove that he’d conveyed a neat package of selfhood to the public. Then he would be sure that who he was on the outside corroborated who he was on the inside. But whenever the story achieved an accurate depiction, he seemed to resent the assumption that he could ever be known. In sum, the character could do nothing right.

  He reached the scene where Y/N bikes down a Berlin street naked, throws herself off, and skids down the asphalt. She uses the pus from her lacerated body to fry up the most delicious meals of Moon’s life. It is an early courtship maneuver.

  Moon groaned in disgust. “Don’t take it so personally,” I said. But whether it was what Y/N did or what Moon ate that he took personally, I wasn’t sure.

  Moon stopped reading after that. He tapped his fingers on the notebook, then slid it back to me.

  “Seems like an interesting story,” he said, as if he’d been hearing about it from someone else.

  “You barely made it past the first chapter,” I said. “Please read until the end. There’s so much I have to tell you. But talking is no good; my words emerge too much in a row. This story is my way of saying everything at once. When it sinks in, you’ll realize that I know you better than anyone else does and that I love you with a pure heart.”

  Moon was examining me carefully.

  “I still can’t tell where your accent is from,” he said slowly. “It makes you sound lighthearted, like you’re joking. But what you say is never funny. The strange formality of your tone … Yes, I know what it is: you speak Korean like a newscaster from an elapsed decade. Yet you mangle the pronunciation of the simplest words. Did someone send you? A company, a government? No, I can’t imagine any group dispatching you as their representative. I can’t even imagine you being someone’s daughter. The first time I saw you, I thought—what an oddly unclear person … like a window covered in dust …”

  “I’m not a stranger. You know me. All of your videos, pictures, messages—they were for me. Don’t make that face, it’s true. You couldn’t have known it at the time, since you didn’t know who I was, but you didn’t need to. Our connection preceded us. I have spent my entire life training myself to feel the feelings I have for you. My perception has been perfectly notched to match the gear of your personality.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t heard this all before,” he said.

  “That can’t be true,” I said, vexed. “No one thinks like I do. Look. Five months ago I was in Germany watching videos of you. Now I’m here. But I feel farther away from you than ever. I don’t miss you because I love you. I love you because I miss you. I used to love the emptiness of my computer screen just for having once contained you.”

  Moon’s face showed neither confusion nor understanding.

  “Germany,” he repeated.

  “It doesn’t matter. Where I come from doesn’t matter. I use all of me to know you. Knowing you is the most serious task of my life. I love the world I hate simply because you live in it. Watching you dance brings tears to my eyes. But I never full-on cry. It’s more like the tears are extending the boundaries of my eyeballs, making me see differently. Some would say ‘badly,’ but I don’t agree with them at all. You are not an object to me. You are not a toy. It’s the opposite. You are far too real to me. I’ve looked at you so much. It’s frightening, actually, how I will never not know what you look like. I usually feel nothing when I kiss a person, but the next day, I obsess over the kiss. I feel it even more intensely than when the kiss was actually happening. I love you because you are this paradox. You are so there in your missing. I want to live as you dance. You move and move and move—and you don’t go anywhere at all. I want …”

  The sound of my own voice was starting to make me sick. Why wasn’t I capable of the seriousness of simplicity? Or perhaps I hadn’t said enough. Perhaps communication was a stamina sport. I went on:

  “I need more time. I need at least a year with you. Let’s go somewhere together. Where do you have the fewest fans? Mallorca? Be around me a lot. You’ll realize what I’m like. We need proper space and time. So that we can simply be. There should be no pressure to get to know each other. That’s how much faith I have in our connection. Everything would come about organically … I wish we’d met through mutual friends. I wish our families had gone to the same church. Don’t you see how hopeless my situation is? It’s not my fault. I could come to know you only in this strange way. But you can make the difference. You can give me hope.”

  Moon hardened his face.

  “And why would I do that?” he said.

  “I know I’ve done nothing to earn your trust. But trust me anyway. Take the risk. Bring the match to the gas. Just imagine what could happen. Aren’t you curious? Even a little bit?”

  “Let’s say I agree to everything you propose,” he said. “Then what? I’ve been wondering about you, Miss Oseol. I’ve been asking myself: Doesn’t she know by now that it was a mistake to come all the way here? Shouldn’t she be with her friends, her family? Why doesn’t she go home? Of all the places in the world—why would you want to be here? You won’t find anything at my side. Our futures can never align.”

  “But our presents have aligned,” I said. “So why can’t our futures? Especially if I invest all of my energy into making sure it does. You see for yourself that I got here on my own. So imagine all that could happen if you played your part. Say yes.”

  “Look,” he said gently. “I don’t know what you’ve been through. I don’t know how to help you. Please understand, I’m just one person. But here’s what I can do. Make a specific request of me. I can give you something I own, I can take a picture with you … If it’s something I can manage, I promise I’ll do it. Then you won’t leave the Sanctuary feeling this was all for nothing.”

  I might as well have been speaking with a well-meaning relative. Here Moon was, setting before me ideas of indisputable rationality, like utensils arranged in order, polished and practical, when he was supposed to be coaxing my imagination into its deepest contortions.

  “Dance for me,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “It’s not time yet.”

  “Haven’t you had enough rest by now?” I said in frustration. “Don’t you miss it? How can you stand to be so far away from your art?”

  “I do miss it,” he said ruefully. “But some things are beyond my control. I only have myself to blame. I would always test my limits. Whenever Sun kept time by clapping his hands, I would fit as many dance steps between two beats as were supposed to fit between four. I’d seen so many incredible videos of myself. Sometimes I would play them at double speed. If my image could move that fast, why couldn’t my body? Sun got angry whenever I sped up my moves. ‘Your heart won’t be able to take it anymore,’ he said, and that’s exactly what happened. The doctors cut me open and stuck a tiny metal contraption inside my heart. It looks like a toy for cats.”

  My mind went numb with confusion.

  “You can’t dance anymore,” I said.

  “I didn’t say that,” Moon said. “I can feel it inside of me still. Deep inside I know how to dance. The moment prior to striking a move—I can inhabit it even now. But the moment lasts no more than an instant, and without the force of my body securing it from the other side, it dissipates. One day I’ll be strong enough to bring it to completion.”