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“I’m writing a dissertation,” she said. “You must have heard the saying that the pen is mightier than the sword. Well, its usage has vanished from popular literature in recent years. What has taken its place is the comparison of the pen to a gun. This reflects, I hypothesize, the growing awareness that the act of writing kills quickly and from a great distance. Literature murders—not the reader, as one might expect, but the characters, who are no different from real people. Behind every character is a person out in the world whose sanctity is violated in the process of literary transfiguration. Every black letter on a white page is a bullet.”
She must’ve assumed I’d meant to ask “What do you do?” It disturbed me that anyone could know what it was they did in the abstract.
“Why do you study literature if you hate literature?” I asked in irritation.
“Hate?” The woman turned the word in her mouth as though it were a pebble she’d just found in her food. “Who said anything about hate. No, I don’t hate literature.” Then she told me I should read the theorist so-and-so. “She’ll make sure you never see a book in the same way again.”
“How uncalled for,” I said.
The woman didn’t reply, her gaze having already moved to the other side of the room. She and I would never see eye to eye. So it was with most people.
“How do you know him?” she asked, looking at Masterson.
“I’m his sister,” I said.
“Strange,” she said uneasily, turning back to me. I could feel her eyes darting around the limited terrain of my face. “He never mentioned having a sister.”
“I’m adopted. We haven’t seen each other in a while.”
“Ah.” She sounded only a little less uneasy. “Where are you from? I mean, where are your birth parents from?”
“I don’t know.”
“You could get a genetic test to find out.”
“I am not my cells.”
“Then what are you?”
“Well, what are you?”
“My cells are collectively called Lise. They come from Heidelberg.”
Only then did I realize who she was. Masterson had told me unforgettable stories about Lise. A year ago, the peaks and troughs of their relationship had reached such amplitudes that within an hour he would go from wanting to marry her to feeling “sick to my stomach” if she so much as uttered his name. Once, while breaking up with her, he’d made the mistake of beginning a sentence with “The way I see it …” She’d snatched the glasses off his face and thrown them to the ground, crushing them under her shoe. Whenever Masterson said he didn’t love her, she persuaded him otherwise. And then he found that he did love her. If most people looked for someone to love, she, like a tax collector, looked for those who failed to love her and made them pay up.
Lise was describing her favorite buildings in Heidelberg, sweeping her hands through the air to draw precise silhouettes. I imagined her cells slamming against the walls of those buildings—from fighting, but mostly from lovemaking, I hoped—and was amazed she stood in one piece before me.
“Will your cells also die in Heidelberg?” I asked.
“I hope so,” she said. “There’s a family plot. Where will you die?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Lise got up and stood before the oblong mirror. She gazed at Masterson over the shoulder of her reflection, then turned away with tranquil acceptance. My eyes remained on the glass, where Masterson, in the distance, was lowering a beer onto the wooden table beside him. He’d built the table from scratch, enthused by his new plan of us moving in together. I’d once laid a pencil on one end and watched it roll to the other and fall off the edge. Our future dinners would go crashing to the floor; I hoped this meant he wanted to starve me so that there was less of me for others to have. Masterson was now uttering a syllable that required him to bare his teeth, but the back of Lise’s head glided into frame and eclipsed his face.
I wanted to concede immediately. I was more convinced by Lise’s feelings for Masterson than my own. She knew what she wanted, she’d even had it before, and when she had it again, she would be happy again.
I got up and tried to recover my view of Masterson in the mirror, but now I was impeded by my own reflection, which, to my shock, looked a bit like Moon. I’d never noticed the resemblance before. It was uncanny, the objective similarity of our features. Especially the lips and eyes, their plushness suggesting an overtaxed sensuality, like they’d been doing too much tasting and too much looking. And the black hair, shining like a helmet. But I was the knockoff version in every point of similarity. Moon’s beauty wasn’t located in a specific physical feature. Instead, there was a tremulous metaphysical orchestration between the various parts of his face. I lacked any such orchestration. If his beauty radiated upon the world, my beauty was local, covering about as much distance as bad breath.
* * *
AFTER THE PARTY, I mashed the leftover cake with the palm of my hand. The buttercream squelched tinily in anguish. Masterson, still seated on the window ledge, unhooked his feet, spread his legs apart, and reached for me. I stood between his knees and let him clasp my waist with his hands.
“How are you?” he asked.
I didn’t know how to answer in the way he wanted. Personally, whenever I asked, “How are you,” I actually meant, “I am not you.” I meant, “Your answer should not be like mine.” Nothing made me want to end a conversation faster than the words “Oh, that reminds me of the time …” I did not want to remind anyone of anything. I did not like to be related to.
In silence, I raised my caked hand to Masterson’s mouth. He sucked my fingers one by one, tongue lurching over every knuckle. I was finally starting to enjoy myself. I could tell because I wished I had more body for the world to work upon. Masterson licked clean the back of my hand, where a temporary tattoo of Moon’s face gradually revealed itself. I still hadn’t told Masterson about Moon. In any case, he didn’t notice the tattoo, which was so poorly rendered that one couldn’t even tell it was supposed to be a person. But I appreciated everything related to Moon, even unrealized intentions.
“Why did you tell everyone you’re my adopted sister?” Masterson asked.
“They kept asking me how I knew you,” I said. “What a crazy question. I would need at least two more boring parties to explain how I know you.”
“We met online,” he said. “Is that so hard to say?”
“How dare you,” I said. “To reduce it like that. How dare you.”
I laid my hands on either side of his head and tugged gently upward, trying to imagine its weight detached from his neck. His forehead spanned no more than three fingers. I sensed that his best ideas resided just behind this remarkable density of bone. His neck, meanwhile, was thin and birdlike—a precarious support.
“Nils nearly threw up when he saw me fondle you in the kitchen,” Masterson said. “I had to explain that you’re not my sister but the person I’m currently considering being in love with.”
“It’s been two months,” I said. “If you’re still considering the possibility, then you’ll never be in love with me.”
“But I want to be in love with you.”
“I never even had a chance to consider it. I loved you as soon as I saw you. I love you resentfully.”
“And I want to love you joyfully. Even considering being in love with you makes me happy. I want that happiness to continue in the actual loving of you. Give me time. I can’t wait to love you one day.”
In his room, we lay on either side of a blade of moonlight running down the length of his bed. We studied each other. A drunken altercation out on the street began and ended by the time we came together with murmurs of relief. Vivid minutes passed. Then I became extremely thirsty. I looked down. Masterson seemed to have set aside his own pleasure like some discrete object and returned to my body with a noble sense of purpose, embarking on touches that I experienced, to my perturbation, as repayment of some kind. But I demanded nothing from Masterson except that he never hold me back from loving him.
I shut my eyes. The darkness behind my lids gradually took on the coherence of a structure. I was back in the concert arena, but there was no crowd this time. I watched alone from the floor as Moon moved down the runway, the esophageal clicks of his shoes echoing throughout the space. When he reached the end of the stage, he jumped onto the floor and continued in my direction. I stood still, luxuriating in the certainty of being arrived at. Nothing in this colossal emptiness could distract him away from me. When he finally stood before me, I took his hand and led him out of the arena into a darkness void of stars, in the depths of which awaited Masterson’s bed.
Moon lay on his back. I crawled on top of him and brushed the hair out of his face. He looked back at me with pure recognition. Both encouraged by his gaze and unable to bear it, I closed my eyes and kissed him. But it was like pressing my lips against the back of my own hand. I felt what he felt of me; I felt what I felt like. With a start, I realized I had no sexual desire for Moon. My sexuality simply loved his sexuality, totally and unblinkingly, without my needing to know anything about what he did with his. I felt disgraced—by life, its strange personal commandments—that I couldn’t simply want him.
Sensing my hesitation, Masterson roughly pushed me aside and straddled the boy. The moon cast a milky net upon the surface of the bed, illuminating the entire length of the latter’s body, while Masterson’s torso jutted upward into the surrounding darkness. He unbuttoned the boy’s shirt down the line. Two panels of pink silk slid away from each other, revealing an expanding bar of luminescent skin. Masterson tugged off the boy’s pants, then his underwear.
“How are you?” Masterson asked.
Moon, gazing up at his lover with sorrowful reverence, opened and shut his mouth without making a sound. He had no words for so much human. In frustration, he grabbed Masterson’s much larger hands and placed them around his own throat. He angled back his chin, extending his neck as long as possible, then used his hands to signal that Masterson should squeeze hard. Surely he had something to say deep inside, extrudable like toothpaste.
“But how are you?” Masterson asked.
Even tighter, Moon signaled.
Masterson clamped his knees shut against Moon’s thighs, throwing his testicles into agitation. Their wizened tenderness audibly skimmed the boy. Masterson began to lower himself onto his young lover, joining that capsule of moonlight, maintaining a grip on Moon’s neck all the while. His face was last to emerge from the darkness, drawing close over Moon’s and creating, between those two planes, a stratum of shadow. Their lips brushed furtively, never quite kissing. Masterson’s exhales were deep and threatening. His martial focus aroused Moon, who, short of breath, opened his mouth and widened the aperture of his throat, enjoying the futile resistance of his neck against the pressure of his lover’s hands.
I knew how all of this felt, better than if I had felt it myself. The boy was my ambassador, sent to a foreign land with which my own land was in delicate relations. I’d never visited this country myself, maimed king as I was.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING I awoke to find Masterson lying on his side, reading a book I’d lent him. He glanced over at me, then held out what looked like a playing card.
“Want this back?” he asked. “I found it tucked between the pages.”
It was a glossy picture of Moon 【创建和谐家园】iling so hard that his eyes were nearly shut. It had come inside the sleek plastic box containing a thirty-day skincare regimen endorsed by the pack of boys. I’d purchased the elaborate set of hydrating face masks just so I could own this image of Moon’s un【创建和谐家园】erated joy. But to encounter the picture now, when I least expected it, so unsettled me that I drew back without taking it from Masterson.
“This is Moon, right?” he said.
I rose to a kneel on the mattress in a daze.
“How do you know who Moon is?” I asked.
“Why shouldn’t I? I live in the world. I stay abreast. What, are you a fan?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not a fan.”
I wanted to follow up with what I actually was, but no word came to mind.
“It’s a fascinating phenomenon, isn’t it?” Masterson said, contemplating the picture.
“What do you mean by ‘it’?” I asked suspiciously.
“We once turned to philosophy for an interpretation of God, for that which lies beyond our comprehension. But philosophy has relinquished its authority to data. Now we know too much, especially what people want and how to give it to them. Religion is no longer a site of our interminable struggle with negativity. Religion, shorn of philosophy, is now a vending machine for manifestation and fulfillment. That’s why there are so many lowercase gods in this secular, cynical era. Oblivious to the contradiction, we yearn for spiritual practices that will make us worthy of receiving permanent answers and solutions. A boy band like this”—Masterson waved the picture of Moon—“is one such god. Here we have data disguised as philosophy, information disguised as art. We no longer go to church once a week; we attend a stadium concert once a year.”
He flashed a broad 【创建和谐家园】ile, excited by ideation. I didn’t even disagree with him. Still, I had my side of things, which wasn’t a side so much as it was its own ecosystem of experience.
“I think I’ll use them for my research,” he said, peering down at Moon with friendly curiosity. “I’ll have to learn everything I can about them.”
I snatched the picture out of his hand.
“What?” he said.
“Moon can’t be researched,” I said. “He’s too variable, too alive. We’re talking tonight, actually. He’ll ask about my day and its key moments of deadlock. He’ll ask insightful follow-up questions. He’ll say nothing when total seriousness of spirit is called for. But he’ll also make me laugh in that spastic, uncontrollable way I never do with you. Like my navel is the twisted end of a sausage coming undone.”
Masterson’s face had gone murky with confusion, but I could see that the premise of my vitriol was starting to dawn on him.
“You’re talking about him as if you know him,” he said carefully.
“I do know him. The person I don’t know is you.”
“Am I supposed to take this seriously?”
“I’m never not serious. I have no idea who you are.”
“But you know Moon. How conveniently hard to prove.”
I had the spontaneous fantasy of burying my heart inside Masterson’s chest, right next to his. But if I couldn’t fully integrate myself into his body, then I would exile myself to Irkutsk. Either way, no longer would I have to wrangle with the ambiguity of the distance between us—one day lush proximity, another day chilling estrangement. I tried to think of the meanest possible thing to say:
“He feeds my imagination more than you do.”
“Of course he does,” Masterson said. “Because he exists in your imagination.”
“He’s a person breathing, eating, and dreaming in Seoul.”
“And I’m a person breathing, eating, and dreaming in Berlin.” Masterson reached over to give my thigh a painful squeeze. “And I know you exist.”
“You might know I exist, but he knows, unlike you, the most important thing there is to know about me, which is my need for spiritual companionship.”
“I think what you mean is that he designs his lyrical content and sexual appeal with the specific intent of exploiting the most basic of human emotions, like loneliness, or the desire for unconditional love, and then derives massive profit from his vampiri【创建和谐家园】.”
I rolled off the bed and began to dress, tucking the picture into a pocket.
“He works a hundred times harder at our relationship than you do,” I said, jamming my foot into a shoe with an aggressive twist of the ankle. “He has physical therapy every day because his tendons are on the constant brink of snapping. Can you say the same about your tendons?”
* * *
WHEN I ENTERED the livestream, I found Moon sitting at a table. Behind him, I recognized the luxury apartment he shared with the other boys in an undisclosed region of Seoul. His eyes were puffy, indicating his fresh departure from the world of dreams. It was morning there. He hummed a wistful tune, his eyes never leaving mine. My teeth felt cold; I was 【创建和谐家园】iling hugely.
“Liver,” he murmured. “I would like to get on a train and head straight for you.”
I missed him so much that my eyes filled with tears. How was it that I missed someone I’d never met before? Someone I hoped to meet one day. Could this mean it was possible to miss the future?
Moon reached over and moved his phone to reveal Mercury sitting across the table. I was stung by the betrayal, his lack of appreciation for our rare chance to be alone together. So uncomfortable was it to have a negative feeling about Moon that I transposed it onto Mercury, and this wrenching of my emotive focus from one boy to the other gave me vertigo. All I could feel for a few seconds was hatred so intense that I worried my heart might never find its way back to its principal feeling of love for Moon.
“Don’t be angry with me,” Moon said into the camera. “It’s not what you think. I do want to be alone with you. But sometimes I can’t stand hearing my own voice for an entire hour.”
Mercury was sitting very still and staring down at the table, as if devoting all his rational faculties to grasping the single most depressing idea in the world. He was known as the least talkative among the boys, but still, his mood today struck me as unusually subdued.
“I wish I could hear your voices one at a time,” Moon continued. “But if I were to have a conversation with each of you for just one minute, it would take two centuries. So I want to try something out. Pretend Mercury is you. Yes, pretend we’re alone in this room together. Type in the chat what you would like to say or do, and Mercury will serve as your representative.”
Moon had barely finished speaking when commands began to pour into the chat. Accordingly, Mercury sprang out of his chair and rushed over to a window, where he hid behind the floor-length curtain and peeked out at Moon.
“Don’t look at me!” Mercury said. “I’m not ready!”
“For what?” Moon asked.
“To be alone with you.”
“There’s not much to it. Trust me. I do it all the time.”
Mercury unrolled himself from the curtain and cautiously approached the table. He returned to his seat, whereupon a myriad of expressions flashed across his face, from harrowing fear to avuncular satisfaction. He ultimately settled on opening his mouth in awe at such a close-up view of Moon.
“Is there any part of you that’s not beautiful?” Mercury asked. “Show me. Then I’ll know for sure that you’re a real person.”
Moon slid his hands across the table: “My cuticles.”
Mercury bent his head over Moon’s hands and pushed back one cuticle after another. He tore out excess bits of skin and made a little pile. Then he sprinkled the bits into his mouth and chewed, the working of his jaws suggesting a consistency like that of jerky.
“I love even your dead skin,” he said mournfully. “I’m doomed.”