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  “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.”

  I couldn’t bear to hear him reassure himself. His days of consecration were over. I wasn’t sure I would’ve come to the Sanctuary had I known he could no longer dance. It appeared that my love had conditions after all. Nothing brought love down to earth more than conditions, and nothing hurt my pride more than my love brought down to earth. The fact that I could threaten Moon with the withdrawal of my love didn’t make me feel powerful. It made me feel intensely weak and empty.

  “It’s an illusion,” I said dully. “You’ll never dance again.”

  Moon opened and shut his mouth without making a sound, then got out of his chair and walked to the corner of the room, where he picked up the receiver of a black rotary phone.

  “Who are you calling?” I asked, standing up.

  “Maehwa.”

  I crossed the room, snatched the phone out of his hand, and pressed it to my ear. The plastic dimmed the noise of the world around me. There was nothing on the other end, not even a busy tone. Moon tore the receiver out of my hand and clutched it to his chest.

  “It’s too late,” I said. “Maehwa doesn’t know what I know. I know what you’ve lost, and so I know who you’re supposed to be.”

  “What do you want from me?” he cried out.

  There was suffering on his face. I’d seen this expression before, in the deepest throes of his dance. But what had once been beautiful, a lacquer stroke of elevation upon his features, only saddened me now. I suddenly missed Moon so much, I thought my chest would crack open from the velocity of the feeling.

  “I wish you were Moon,” I said.

  He turned his head away from me, exposing his neck. There, a muscle pulsated just once, powerfully. I imagined that pulsation as a blue spirit traveling all the way down to his penis, which, unanchored, would jump in place, startled by the invasion. That line I’d always loved from the neck to the penis—this was the spirit’s highway. Love for Moon pressed down upon my body all over again. I took hold of his shoulders and plunged into his neck. I dragged my lips across its skin, my hunger growing with every attempt to sate it. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know where it was possible to go. His skin was a dead end.

  Moon pushed me away. Adolescent cruelty glimmered in his eyes. He was breathing hard. His voice was soft but not at all gentle:

  “Why didn’t you say this was what you wanted? Were you ashamed to want the same thing as everyone else?”

  “It’s not what you think,” I said, taking another step forward.

  A weight knocked my head to the side. I blinked in pain, of all kinds. Through my tears, I could see Moon wielding the phone over his head, its cord quivering like the tail of a frightened animal.

  * * *

  THE FULL MOON was spilling its radioactive milk everywhere. I rolled onto my side and threw my arm across the bedsheet. Its inner crook appeared unusually tender tonight. I breathed as quietly as possible, afraid that I might miss the sound of Moon’s footsteps overhead. But something else rose out of the silence. Something much faster and sharper than the dull thud of feet.

  Infinitesimal crunches of metal. Four clicks per second.

  I rose from bed and followed the noise out of my room. It guided me down the stairs and back to the kitchen. There were now two clicks per second. The closer I drew to the pocket watch, the more it slowed down. This was its way of telling me where to go.

  I paced the kitchen, unsure of my next move. Then I saw that the door to the pantry was open. I entered to find its walls lined with glass jars of pickled vegetables turning slowly in their juices. To my surprise, the compartment grew larger with every step I took. I moved deeper and deeper inside, until the space swerved to the right, revealing a tightly winding staircase. When I reached the top, dizzy from all the circles I’d made, I found myself standing before a sliding wooden door, ajar by a centimeter. I peered through the crack.

  Before me was a 【创建和谐家园】all room that lay directly under the Sanctuary’s sloping roof. Maehwa was standing in a white dress that fell to her knees. Her hair was free from its braid. In the large awning window, the moon was the cross section of a boiled potato hanging over the lake, casting an abalone luster upon the water and the mountains rising in the distance. Maehwa reached her hand through the opening and gently pulled the window shut. The quiet of the room latched itself in.

  She lowered herself onto the edge of a mat. Only then did I notice, amidst the tangle of white blankets, Moon asleep on his back. He had no shirt on, only a sheen of perspiration that accentuated the contours of his softly heaving chest.

  The ticking was irregular, barely perceptible, all but dying now. At times, the pounding of blood in my ears obscured the noise entirely.

  Moon’s eyes were still shut in sleep when he began a fitful struggle to free himself from a sheet twisted around his waist. Once liberated, he threw his arms over his head, making his back arch and his ribs rise. And then I saw it, the part of him that I had always wondered about. Its sudden appearance shocked me nonetheless. Moon’s arms and legs were flung out in the shape of a star in the stifling heat, but the penis was curled into itself. Its season was winter. There was something vague yet resolute about it, as if it had spent the night drinking and was now swooning in the depths of strange dreams, unafraid of what it had to confront in the secret world of itself.

  Maehwa slid a hand across Moon’s chest until her fingers curved around his side. She hooked herself there as if he were the edge of a cliff. She tilted up her head, alert to something in the air. Had she heard the ticking, too?

  The penis began a steady expansion into itself, the tip unsheathing, its contours sharpening. What was once as soft as an eyelid was now as hard as a rock. As the penis rose straight into the air, it assumed the appearance of an ancient arrowhead. It cast a baleful gaze upon its surroundings as its master remained sunk in unconsciousness. But Moon’s hand suddenly rose from the mat. Maehwa did not turn her head to look at it. I watched as the hand slowly came to a rest on the side of her face. She bent her neck to enter the caress more deeply.

  “It’s here, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Almost.”

  Moon’s hand fell away from her face and landed upon her hand. He held it for a moment—merely held it—then moved it a few centimeters lower on his chest.

  “There,” he said, as if his heart were a distant shore.

  12. Pure Future

  UPON RETURNING FROM THE SANCTUARY, I considered buying a flight out of Seoul to depart that very evening. But I didn’t know where I wanted the flight to take me. I was sick of traveling. What I wanted was someone or something to follow.

  My tourist visa was set to expire at midnight. I had a four p.m. appointment at the immigration office to apply for a heritage visa, but on my way there, I made the impulsive decision to exit the subway station instead of boarding my transfer. On the crowded escalator up to the street, I had the sensation that all of us, squinting with confusion into the blast of sun, were being safely delivered out of a bomb shelter but feeling unhappy about the straightforward responsibilities that awaited us.

  When O opened the door, I gave a sorry 【创建和谐家园】ile. This hurt my face because I hadn’t 【创建和谐家园】iled in a long time. Her cheeks were gaunt and sallow, and her hair was thrown up into a haphazard bun. But I noticed that her eyes were shining with unusual power. She turned them away, as if to spare me, and stepped aside to let me in.

  The living room wasn’t how I remembered it. The pla【创建和谐家园】a screen had been replaced with a much larger model. It wasn’t on, but it emanated an ugly impatience to be brought back to life, instead of receding quietly into the room. The couch had been pushed aside to make space for an electric massage bed, which suggested that O’s mother now liked to watch the news by lying on the contraption with her head turned sharply to the side. There was a subwoofer speaker standing next to it. I imagined the woman pressing her hand against its shuddering mesh to feel upon her skin that which she could not hear.

  O’s mother appeared to be in her bedroom with the door closed. Meanwhile, the door to the veranda was open. Cicadas were lusting in multitudes. There must have been cicadas crying out at the Sanctuary as well, but strangely, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been conscious of the noise. O’s apartment seemed to be the only place left on earth where my ears could recover their virginal astonishment. Since returning to Seoul, I’d been avoiding thinking about Moon, but now I recalled, with intense pain, how my body had traversed those two days in complete error.

  All of a sudden, a female voice, at once strident and coquettish, resounded through the living room: “Hello. For your safety, for your children’s safety, for the safety of the elderly, for your pets’ safety, and for the safety of your indoor plants, please keep your windows shut between the hours of four and six p.m. Hello. For your safety, for your children’s safety …” The woman sounded annoyed with her addressee for having gotten involved with so many things that could die. Once she’d repeated her injunction in full, there was a shrill beep, then a return to the swelling chorus outside.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  O gestured at the intercom on the wall.

  “The building management has been playing that message all day,” she said. “The number of cicadas has grown out of control this year. It’s impossible to walk past the trees below. Cicadas everywhere. It’s dangerous, pretty much like walking through a cloud of shrapnel. You must’ve come from the other side of the building. Anyway, a company will come and spray a special chemical on the trees.”

  “What’s special about it?” I asked.

  “First the cicada’s legs fall off,” O said. “Then its skin cracks open. The internal organs slide out intact. All fluids promptly evaporate. The massacre will be easy to clean up.”

  I glanced up at the clock. It was five minutes to four. I thought of my appointment at the immigration office. I liked pretending there was still a chance of obtaining a heritage visa. There wasn’t. But anything felt possible in the few minutes between where I was and where I was supposed to be.

  O stood on the threshold of the veranda, pausing to observe a cicada clinging to the wire screen. The insect buzzed with ferocity, as if issuing a personal threat against O. It flew away like a war helicopter, then dropped out of the air in seeming malfunction. More cicadas visited the balcony, always briefly and one at a time. It was as if a disagreement had broken out among the cicadas in the trees below, and now they were attempting to strike out on their own by rising high into the air, where, trapped between the colorless facade of one apartment tower and another, they lost their fortitude and plunged back into the disgruntled swarm.

  It was now one minute to four. Outside, a machine could be heard whirring to gargantuan life. It was with seeming reluctance that O finally shut the veranda door.

  We went to her bedroom. I sat on the edge of O’s bed and looked around. The lights were off, but a bit of sun filtered through the room’s only window. Her paintings were nowhere to be seen.

  “It’s strange to be back in Seoul,” I said.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “Somewhere else.”

  O closed the door and reached high above the frame, unfurling a white bedsheet. She 【创建和谐家园】oothed out the wrinkles but could do nothing about the doorknob bulging through the fabric. She joined me on the edge of the bed and set a projector machine on her lap.

  “I was also somewhere else,” she said.

  “Is that so?” I said. “Strange that I didn’t run into you.”

  “Somewhere else is very big,” she said.

  There was a new reserve about O. She didn’t seem to belong to her own room anymore. I had the sense that she really had been somewhere else, perhaps more somewhere else than I had been. It even seemed possible that I hadn’t been somewhere else at all. Before I could ask her anything about it, she clicked on the projector.

  * * *

  THE FILM BEGAN. O appeared on the bedsheet, playing the part of a painter. In all aspects of her life, this painter commits to nothing and believes in nothing. She lives in pursuit of visual noise, filling her canvas with anything but white. She has virtuosic technique, but sometimes it strikes her as meaningless for lack of a perfect subject. She has style without content, idiosyncrasy without a mission, personality without a point.

  The painter has one friend, a writer, played by a Korean woman who looked nothing like me. This writer rambles on and on about her obsession with a man. The writer is the painter’s exact foil: she possesses no technical capability, no style, no idiosyncrasy, having surrendered too much of herself to the perfect subject. When she is not talking about the man, she is writing about him. Her sprawling texts, composed in a trance, escape her own comprehension. Her beloved, who never shows up in the film, is a vortex into which her artistic potential has disappeared.

  At one point, the writer says: “I conceive of the mind as a shirt. Every idea is a button or a hole. We pair up ideas, button to hole, so that the two parts of the shirt align and sit well upon the body. But I want my shirt to misalign so that it presses against the body in the wrong places. I want nothing to fit. The button entering the wrong hole—I worship this vector. This vector is the future. That’s why I love him. He is that vector spun like thread into human. He is pure future. It’s not him that I love. I love the story of him. That’s why I don’t know how to write well. What’s the point of writing well when the story is already perfect? I channel his story. I add nothing to it. I keep the broth spare and intense.”

  I’d never said these words before. The writer spoke in English with a heavy Korean accent.

  In another scene, the painter and the writer stand before the water fountain at Children’s Grand Park. They are watching a water show coordinated to exuberant love songs blasting over the park’s speakers. The writer walks ahead and stands among the children stamping in the puddles that surround the fountain. Upon the song’s propulsive entrance into the chorus, she shoots a hand into the air, conjuring a thick lance of water from the center of the fountain. She makes repeated scooping motions with her hand, urging the 【创建和谐家园】aller streams of water along the fountain’s edge to reveal themselves, all down the perimeter. The water is her dance troupe, and she their conductor.

  The children back away, perturbed by how this 【创建和谐家园】 plays.

  Of course, the writer has no actual influence over the fountain. But she displays such prophetic sensitivity to its exertions that the painter is capable, for as long as the song lasts, of believing that the strange world in which she lives is in her friend’s hands. The painter feels safe, nestled in the folds of an elusive external logic that loves her.

  In the final scene, the two women are in the painter’s bedroom. The camera captures them through the doorway. A canvas lies on the floor. The painter gets onto her hands and knees to peer over the edge of the canvas as though it were a pond. The writer looks over her friend’s shoulder. That’s when the painting, and only the painting, fills the screen.

  In a voiceover, the painter delivers a monologue. She says that her first strokes on the canvas were devoted to the back of the writer’s left knee; never before had she begun a portrait somewhere other than the subject’s face. Once she fully rendered both knees, she coaxed them into telling her about the person to whom they belonged. In ringing unison, they said that they’d never seen their owner’s face. All they knew was that she was always speaking to someone named Moon. What this meant, they couldn’t be sure. Maybe all of her friends had the same name, Moon. Maybe she was still in bed with her lover, Moon. Maybe she worshipped a god, Moon. Whoever he was, the knees knew that the writer’s precarious sense of self would crumble without him. So they liked to imagine Moon as existing on her very body.

  Hearing this, the painter had a stroke of inspiration.

  “I’m sick of faces,” she says. “It’s time that we see the world from a different perspective. Why can’t we start seeing from the backs of our knees? Why can’t we see each other knee to knee, instead of face to face?”

  I stood up and drew toward the bedsheet. The painting was a nude portrait of the back of my body. In it, my hair was black and buzzed short. I was looking over my left shoulder, but I had my neck twisted to such an abnormal extent that you could see my entire face. The folds in my neck were like the spiraling ridges of a screw; my head was lodging itself ever deeper into the slot between my shoulders. But that wasn’t the strangest part. Moon’s face seemed to have sprouted on my head and tectonically shifted my face to the left. His left cheek blended seamlessly into my right. Because the perspective privileged my face, his was visible only in part, but it likely existed in completion like mine. I was sharing my head with Moon. Neither of us were 【创建和谐家园】iling.

  Never before had such an image existed: Moon and I, together as one. In the painting, we merged with a perfection that other couples could only dream of. Our adjacent cheeks fused into one—this was more sexual than sex. I listened from the left ear, he from the right; we were spies on each other’s behalf. The world aggressed us as one unit; we no longer experienced anything alone. When one of us laughed, it infected the other, and then it became near impossible to stop laughing, and in fact only escalated, overtaxing our shared pair of lungs.

  I turned to face O.

  “Show me the painting,” I said.

  O ignored me. Her eyes were glued to my chest. I looked down. The film was playing over and past my breasts, which were too 【创建和谐家园】all to disturb the integrity of the image. Only when the film had blacked out in conclusion did O acknowledge me.

  “I hope you agree that film suits me much better than painting,” she said.

  * * *

  O WAS PACING the room with her arms crossed. She ignored my repeated requests to see the painting. Meanwhile, a black substance was being sprayed onto the bedroom window in periodic bursts, as though by someone handling a garden hose.

  “O,” I said. “Come on.”

  “That’s not my name anymore.”

  “What, are you back to Oseol now?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  She came to a stop before me.

  “I met someone,” she said. “I changed my name into a word that only he will ever use. It took me days to decide on the name. I wanted two syllables that had never been conjoined before. I’m sorry if you’ve been trying to call me. But I had to disconnect my number. I’ve had to shut off everything so that I can focus on what I’m feeling. Like I’m burning alive. You’ll have to keep calling me O, by the way—I just want to make sure you’re aware that it’s no longer my name even as you keep using it. I need everyone to know they’re wrong, so that the feeling of being right can be his alone.”

  O proceeded to tell her story in a fevered monotone. After dropping me off at Polygon Plaza, she had fallen into a strange mood. She hadn’t felt ready to go home. So she got off the subway at Itaewon and walked around until late at night, watching Koreans stumble arm in arm with foreigners down the crowded street. That was when she saw him. He was walking ahead of her, determined to be alone. It moved her to witness his solitude amidst so much anxious socializing. His blue trousers were fraying at the ends, and his black oxfords appeared to be of different sizes. His thick black hair stuck out in all directions with a fresh incorrigibility suggesting that he’d sheared it himself in a moment of crisis. O followed him into a nightclub. She sat at a table in the dark space surrounding the dance floor and watched him enter the fray. Blue lights swung in disorder overhead. The man sporadically bobbed into appearance between other people’s heads; it was a curse to see his face so abruptly eclipsed by ones that meant nothing to her. O felt herself swerving into a fatal imbalance at the sight of his beauty. She ordered enough drinks and food to cover her entire table so that she could be disgusted by their comparative mediocrity and leave it all untouched. A menacingly average man stopped by to ask where she could be found online, but she kept her mouth shut, having nothing to tell him, for in that moment, every part of her body was tenaciously unvirtual.

  That was how the relationship had begun. Sung was a screenwriter for period dramas, but he had greater ambitions, a desire to sink his probe into the mia【创建和谐家园】ic present. Intrigued by O’s story about my love for Moon, he’d suggested they make a short film together.

  “We talk so much that we forget to eat sometimes,” she said. “Once, we lost track of time entirely and couldn’t tell if it was dawn or dusk outside. I felt exquisitely alone with him at that moment, like we were somewhere in the world that no one else could be. Perfectly in between. Benighted together.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The room was getting darker. A tremor was running through the entire building; when I lightly pressed my teeth together, they began to chatter.

  “I’m happy for you,” I finally said.

  “Well, I’m not,” O said. “I feel like throwing up all the time. For can there be such a thing as a happy soul? A soul that is fully in the thrum of living?”

  O proceeded to say that she regretted having encouraged me to find Moon. She had been lonely and angry; she had wanted to help herself through me. She now suspected that I would persist in my search just to prove a point. But she herself no longer had patience for ideas in their pure form.

  “I would love for you to know what this feels like,” she said. “I would love for you to feel as badly as I do. But you’re headed for a place without answers. So turn back around and dig your heels into a world that’s been waiting here for you all along.”

  “I’m leaving Seoul.” The decision had long been made; I was only now awakening to it. “You should come with me.”

  “No,” O said. “I can’t do that. The idea of getting on a plane with you and heading in a straight line, but knowing that you’re actually making me lost—it scares me.”

  A thin black film now coated the window in its entirety. The room had grown so dark that I had trouble discerning the expression on O’s face. Exhaustion was blooming behind my eyes, and I felt dangerously close to falling asleep. O’s voice was all that I could hold on to for orientation. But at the moment she was using it like a knife.

  “I wish I were made of glass,” I said. “Then you could see right into me. I wouldn’t have to say a word to make you understand what I’m feeling.”

  “It’s more likely that I would see right through you,” O said. “Which means I wouldn’t see you at all. I’d forget you’re there and crash into you like a glass wall. Flesh constitutes a tradeoff: it lets you know that a person is standing before you, but you have no idea what this person means.”

  She came to a crouch before me and peered up at my face.

  “O,” I said. “Show me the painting.”

  “You already saw it,” she said. “In the film.”

  “I want to see the real thing.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”

  O gently pushed aside my legs. Then she reached under the bed, deeper and deeper, until even her head disappeared. She emerged with the painting, her eyes visible just over the canvas. It took me a long time to understand what I was seeing. The back of my left knee was rendered in vivid detail, while the back of my right knee remained a whorl of black strokes.