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“I love even your dead skin,” he said mournfully. “I’m doomed.”
Mercury broke into a 【创建和谐家园】ile that prefaced inappropriate laughter. But he didn’t laugh. Instead, he murmured that he was cold and alone in a convalescent home, then something about wanting to hide under the table whenever a person more beautiful than him entered the room. He 【创建和谐家园】iled the whole time he spoke.
Then he got up and briefly disappeared out of frame. He returned with a candle and lit it with a match.
“Are you burnable?” he asked, grabbing Moon’s hand and placing it over the flame. “It’s hard to imagine you being made of the same material as me.”
“Yes,” Moon said. “That really hurts.”
“I’ll be so mad if you die before me.”
“Stop, stop.”
Moon had been watching Mercury with tender curiosity, but now he snapped his hand free and glowered at the other boy.
“Is this really how you want to spend the little time we have together?” Moon asked. “Isn’t there anything you would like to talk about?”
At this, Mercury came alive with the desire for conversation, but in such excess that a conversation became all but impossible. He broached a vast array of topics:
“Is it true that women in Korea have auras white as snow? How do you like your eggs? May I bear your children? How do I make him agree to be loved by me? Should I say yes? Are you ever embarrassed for me? Don’t spare my feelings. Do I look hideous when I scream for you? When I listen to the news, I get jealous of the most horrible event of the day, like a high schooler gunning down his clas【创建和谐家园】ates or families getting burned to a crisp by a military strike. I wish I were a horrible event so that you’d hear about me. Hey, why don’t you like Dostoevsky?”
Before Moon could reply, Mercury got up from his seat and positioned himself behind Moon. He wrapped his arms around Moon’s neck. First, the embrace was friendly. But then a hand wandered across Moon’s chest. This hand freed the top button of Moon’s shirt. Moon slapped it away. The hand, immediately cowed, retreated to Moon’s shoulder and patted it like a business partner. But then the voluptuous spirit that had lived in the hand entered Mercury’s lips, and they dropped little kisses along the area where Moon’s shoulder curved into neck. Mercury’s lips eventually reached the Adam’s apple, which was bobbing with anxiety.
“Please …” Moon said.
Mercury’s hands leapt to his face. He staggered away in reverse, then dropped out of view, somewhere below the table.
“Am I making you uncomfortable?” I could hear him saying. “Will this go down in your psychological history as the moment it all changed for the worse? Will you have to recover from me? I’m ashamed of how bad I am at living. To become a human being is the only task, and I’m dimly aware that its accomplishment requires that I run the hands of truth, briefly gifted from above, over the most secret part of another person. But no one will let me. So should I kill myself? Tell me how. I want to pull it off with such dark elegance that it makes you proud.”
“No no no,” Moon said.
He slid out of the chair and lowered himself to the floor, also disappearing from view. Only weeping could be heard. Because its source was nowhere to be seen, the weeping seemed to live on my side of the screen, and I felt that if I were to shut my laptop, the weeping would continue.
I looked at the chat window for the first time since Mercury had begun his work as our medium. Infighting had erupted. The fans who worshipped Moon within the context of a religious practice were outraged by the sacrilege of the fans who wanted a chance at romantic love with him. Both groups, in turn, were exasperated by the wholesome few who just wanted to “get to know him better.”
A hand appeared from the side of the frame and veered toward the screen. I turned my face to offer up a cheek, burning in anticipation of the caress I desired from Moon. But as soon as his palm was large enough that I could see its crooked life line, my screen went black and the weeping vanished.
3. fleurfloor
ONE AFTERNOON, SITTING ON THE edge of his bed, head in his hands, Masterson said that, try as he might, he couldn’t bring himself to fall in love with me and probably never would.
“Of course not,” I said, rolling off the mattress and proceeding to collect my books from his desk. The movements came naturally; getting out of someone’s way was my default. “One time I left my journal here as if by accident, hoping you’d sneak a look. But you didn’t. How could you possibly love me when you’re not in the least curious about me?”
“You’re hurt,” Masterson said. “You’re drawing irrational connections.”
“Connections aren’t irrational enough. People should jump to more conclusions.” I was struck by the impossibility of conveying what I felt, which was crushing disappointment. It was a feeling that a child would have no trouble expressing. “I really am your adopted sister. You know you’re supposed to love me, but you don’t know how to make the feelings seem organic, like they were always there.”
“You may be right,” Masterson said with delicacy. “But I know what love feels like. I’ve felt it before.”
“And what does it feel like? Butterflies in your stomach? Makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck?”
“Yes,” he said. “You think it’s stupid, but yes.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid,” I said coldly. “I don’t think it’s stupid at all.”
“You always do this, you bully the feelings right out of everything. I want to feel like I’m coming back somewhere. I want to feel at home with you.”
I nodded without meeting his eyes, finding it impossible to argue. He was right in exactly the wrong way. I hugged the books to my chest until I could feel my heart knocking against their covers. Masterson had borrowed and read all of them. Sometimes I imagined us meeting in the room of our mutual reading and continuing—fulfilling—our lives there. But I had no idea how to access this room, and talking about the books only made things worse.
“I want to feel at home with you,” he repeated.
Cradling the books, I buried my face in his lap and said he was the stupidest person I’d ever met, even stupider than me.
* * *
I WROTE MASTERSON a letter by hand without thinking. When I was done, I was surprised to see what I’d written: “So many people look at me with their eyes but don’t actually see me. You’re different. You don’t even know I exist, but you see me.” There were also lines like “I love you so so so much” and “You are the most rewatchable person I know. Something about you is always new.” Realizing what I’d done, I crossed out “asters” in “Dear Masterson” and scratched in a big “o” overhead.
I sealed the letter and mailed it to Masterson.
It was likely he’d have no idea what I was getting at, but better that he have none of the idea than have him grasp most but not all of it. I was tired of making arguments and revelations, of words falling out of my mouth and exploding in another person’s face. Such crudeness necessarily introduced error. What I wanted was to speak of intensity without speaking intensely. My dream was of a communicative maneuver so subtle that Masterson’s thinking eventually accommodated mine without him realizing it.
There was no reply. So I started writing Masterson another letter addressed to Moon. But I ended up writing a story instead.
It begins with the narrator waiting at a bus stop in Berlin. She rubs her eyes. The accumulation of floaters is spoiling her sight of the world, which is simply there, neither obscure nor clear. But should the world be obscure, she wants a clear view of this obscurity. She turns her head and notices a man sucking on a cigarette with unusual patience. She finds him beautiful and hopes no one else at the bus stop thinks the same. Her perception of beauty shudders at the idea of their agreement.
She approaches the man and asks for a drag. He hands over the cigarette without a word. She sucks on it with such force that the 【创建和谐家园】oke surges into the cavern of her head. She is not a 【创建和谐家园】oker. There is no habit for her to occupy with poise, there is only the raw gesture of desire. She hopes all of this comes across. Eyes watering, she hands back the cigarette.
“I already know I would endure unjustifiable pain for you,” she says, slipping a hand into his coat pocket and rubbing the loose change between her fingers.
“Then let’s do something together,” the man says. “Should we eat? I know I should. But I have no appetite to speak of. I was born with a stomach 【创建和谐家园】aller than my heart, but, look, this entire body of mine”—he gestures down at himself—“is incredibly long. There is so much of me to fuel.”
The bus arrives, but the two do not get on. As they walk down the street, the narrator senses they were rudely cut off in a previous life. It is possible, she realizes for the first time ever, to open her mouth and say exactly what she’s thinking.
At a cheap bistro, the two share a large flatbread folded around a charred strip of meat. The man eats in a highly forgettable way. She likes this, how the sight of the food nearing his mouth promptly deletes itself. She learns that he is a philosopher named Moon. He learns that she is not much of anything; she describes herself as empty spaces gathered into the shape of a human body. Just before parting ways, they exchange their cell phones so that all they must do in order to reach each other is dial their own number from memory. Their phones have become walkie-talkies for the two of them alone. It’s obvious they won’t be contacting anyone else ever again.
The next day, the narrator reads Moon’s latest book in one sitting and understands everything without knowing what it is that she is understanding. The experience fills her with violent light. She wants to hand her mind a butcher’s knife with which to hack away every weak and convenient thought. She also wants to risk the greatest possible confusion. She quickly realizes that these desires are one and the same. The lucid strangeness of the philosopher’s work occasionally brings her to tears.
“Thank you for not trying to relate to me,” she says, shaking the book like a box of cereal.
Moon writes and publishes another book in a matter of weeks just so that she will have more to read. He leaves his wife and children. So much does she admire his cold decisiveness that she looks forward to suffering the same abandonment in the future. In preparation, she practices holding her breath underwater until all of her is pain.
“Be out in the world with me,” she tells him over the phone. “Let’s pretend we’re video-game characters with multiple chances at life and move into unusual circumstances without fear.”
But they do not walk side by side. On the street, she stays several meters behind him so that she is always longing for him. Despite their open mutual understanding that they are in love, they are slow about coming together. They meet seventeen times before they properly touch.
“So this is life,” she thinks in the midst of it. “I’m dying.”
The philosopher neither dances nor sings. In fact, whenever music plays, he falls utterly still and shuts his eyes. So what makes the philosopher Moon? What makes him Moonish?
It’s the neck. Moon the character and Moon the real person are endowed with the same neck. To the narrator’s fascination, the longer she looks at Moon’s neck, the less human it appears. It’s a Rubin vase: she can never see the whole thing at once. It evades her—but with shocking force of personality. The neck explains everything—and how it does so is expressed not by “because” but by “in spite of.” Its proximity to the charming undulations of the face brings into sharp relief its possession of an obscenely impersonal will, a fluency in violence, the personality of a shy psychopath.
I sent the scenes to Masterson. Still no reply.
I discovered Archimage not long afterward. The website contained thousands of fan-written stories organized by the celebrity or fictional character featured in them. There were 【创建和谐家园】aller categorizations based on the story’s emotive instigation, tagged with what each story “makes you …” My favorite stories about Moon almost always had the tag “makes you end friendships.” Frankly, most of the stories were unreadable. After all, the authors weren’t writers, but fans who had turned to language as a last resort. I could feel the frustration mounting as the prose grew ever more sodden, as the author submitted to yet another cliché, hoping their strange feelings would foment, coherently limbed, out of the primordial soup of failing story. But I preferred these stories to most contemporary novels, which mirrored the pieties of the day with absurd ardor. For all the lone superiority suggested by their tone of moral indignation, these books were mind-numbingly easy to agree with. I preferred reading fans and dead people because they were hard to agree with.
I couldn’t stop thinking about my two lovesick characters. So I took my scenes and copied them into a dedicated notebook, then continued the story there. Once I’d completed what felt like a chapter, I typed out the text and published it on Archimage under the username fleurfloor.
Then I dyed my hair completely white. My visual goal was a widow interested in remarrying.
* * *
THE PACK OF boys’ latest music video reached some incredible number of views, setting yet another world record. The next day, the Berlin chapter of the fandom hosted a celebration in a café. When I arrived, I balked at the threshold, sensing the presence of others like me. There was, slicing a 【创建和谐家园】ographic line through the bloated cheer, a hostile energy that could be produced only by abnormal love for Moon. I wasn’t sure how to navigate a space filled with strangers who knew I loved what they loved. It was like going to the sauna, except our naked bodies were identical, which made the embarras【创建和谐家园】ent recursive and pointless.
A young woman approached me:
“Hi, I’m two in Liver age. The day I became a Liver, a pair of large men entered my apartment and offered faster internet service. You?”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m an infant. The day I became a Liver, the guy sitting next to me on the subway was reading a book called ‘How to Become a CEO.’ That’s how I knew he wasn’t a CEO. I found it horrible to know at a single glance what a person wasn’t.”
Fans remembered details from their lives in arbitrary connection with the pack of boys. It was how we kept track of time.
The woman, who was the president of the Berlin chapter, asked if I would like to “contribute to the happiness of everyone here.” My honest answer was no, but out of politeness, I let her take me behind a folding screen, where four women were getting dressed in thrifted versions of outfits the boys had worn in their record-breaking video. The president pushed a bundle of clothing into my arms.
“You’ll make a great Moon,” she said.
Once outfitted, the five of us emerged from behind the screen as the hit song played over the speakers. We were greeted by screams of delight. A crew from a local news station followed us around as if we were anthropological subjects. I floated through the room in a pink cape made of imitation silk. Everyone took pictures with me. Some requested I hold their phone so that the picture would capture my extended arm as proof of my personal investment in achieving the image.
“I love you,” everyone said.
“I love you more,” I said, meaning it. I had to if I wanted to believe that Moon would say the same to me.
Afterward, we split into 【创建和谐家园】all groups for “confession sessions.” I was startled to see Lise across the table from me, my emulation of Moon’s signature sprawled across her forearm in black marker. In the frenzy of an hour ago, I must have given her an autograph without recognizing her. I tried to make eye contact, but she blushed deeply and averted her gaze.
An engineer who specialized in making robotic wrists “swivel in a human way” took full control of the conversation. We were incredibly lucky, he said, to be alive at the same time as the boys during this epochal moment in history. Christianity and capitali【创建和谐家园】—might he and other fans come together to form a movement to rival even these? Could we take over every other movement and thereby supersede our own particularity to become equivalent to humanity itself? He confessed that his deepest desire was to serve as the prime minister of a nation composed solely of fans and to declare all kinds of edicts.
Lise was next. In a voice trembling with shy excitement, she confessed that she’d come to love Moon without knowing anything about him. It had all started when she’d stumbled upon a piece of Y/N fic, which, she explained, was a type of fanfiction where the protagonist was called Y/N, or “your name.” Wherever Y/N appeared in the text, the reader could plug in their own name, thereby sharing events with the celebrity they had no chance of meeting in real life.
Reading her first Y/N story, Lise had learned incredible things about herself: At nineteen, she gave birth to Moon out of wedlock and was forced by her aristocratic family to leave him at an orphanage. He grew up to become a truck driver who specialized in transporting prize horses. This was how she reunited with her son, who strode up to the gates of her estate with a chestnut mare rearing at his side. The two recognized each other without exchanging a word. What commenced was a dreamlike summer in which the pair covered great distances side by side, she on horseback, Moon in his truck …
Only after finishing the story did Lise find out about the pack of boys, their fame, how Moon sang and danced alongside the others. But all of this mattered little to her. Hungry to uncover new facets of herself, she began to read one Y/N story after another.
The engineer straightened out his back like a displeased patriarch.
“Y/N fic puts me to sleep,” he said. “In order to accommodate the biography of every reader that might chance upon the story, the writer creates a character void of personality. But there can be no story without a proper protagonist. So there is never a story when it comes to Y/N. There are only absurd and arbitrary leaps in plot. All of this amounts to a warning, one I urge you to heed. Anyone who pursues the delusional fantasy of being Moon’s chosen one can expect to have their identity wiped out. This”—he gestured at our table, the event—“is so much bigger than you. You are not Y/N. All of us are, all at once.”
“No,” Lise said without blinking. “Only I’m Y/N. There’s been just one time that I wasn’t Y/N.”
She recounted how, wanting to know what it was like to be neighbors with Moon, she’d started reading a story in which he lived in Berlin. To her disturbance, he turned out to be just like her ex. They were both philosophers, and they read the same books, hung out at the same bars. They even had the same birthmark on the inside of their left thighs, and they both waved like a madman whenever they saw her approaching from a distance.
“The Y/N of that story couldn’t have been me,” she said, “because that Y/N was too me. The point is that I’m no longer me. I’m Y/N. I’ve taken my destiny into my own hands, and I’ve decided that I am now a person who knows Moon.”
It appeared that Lise had read my story on Archimage. I tried to meet her eyes once more, but she kept her gaze on the engineer, which I found admirably resilient, given his look of intensifying disdain.
“One person can’t possibly be so many different people,” he said. “You say you’re Y/N, but you’re really no one at all. You’re the placeholder itself. A vacancy waiting to be filled.”
“Exactly,” Lise said with a dreamy 【创建和谐家园】ile. “Moon is a feat of singularity. There has never been anyone like him and there never will be. He is too specific, too unusual. I must try my hand at being everyone if I am to coincide with him. He stays in one place; I roam endlessly.”
I broke in: “But what about your work, your friends, the life you wake up to every morning? Even now—how do you stay real to yourself as you sit here?”
Lips aquiver, she mustered all her strength not to look at me. Irked by her evasion, I pushed on:
“Lise, right? Or do you no longer go by Lise?”
Her eyes jerked in my direction. Her hands flew up to her face.
“I know you’re not him,” she said in tears. “But I feel horribly excited and embarrassed talking about Moon in front of you. You were only pretending to be Moon, but I already know I would do anything for you. You make me laugh, cry, and scream. You do it all so much better and faster than my ex. You’re an advanced machine that’s put him out of work. I used to think I could never love anyone else. But when we got back together recently, it lasted just a day. I kept wishing you were our son. I forced him to take pictures with an empty space between us because that was supposed to be you there.”
* * *
MY BEDROOM HAD a large square window that hinged open like a door. It was Sunday morning. Down below, the unpeopled, unvegetated street gave the impression of having been purged by relentless human activity. The air was dense with the 【创建和谐家园】ell of meat cooked in oil, freshly brewed coffee, and cigarettes—all manners of burning substances into deeper tastes. Two young bleary-eyed people dressed in black stumbled in from the left. The most conspicuous thing about them was that they weren’t rabid with desire for each other. Church bells rang in the distance. I couldn’t imagine anyone sitting in the pews.
I opened my notebook and continued my story about Y/N and Moon:
The couple moves to Seoul so that Moon, an adoptee, can find his birth mother. Neither of them know Korean, so Y/N proposes they take a language course together:
“Me, Korean American. You, Korean German. When we speak in English, you struggle to express yourself. When we speak in German, I struggle to express myself. But if we were to speak in Korean, we’d be at an equal loss.”
They sign up, they sit down, they look up at the whiteboard. At home they are up to their knees in workbooks. The phonics, unfamiliar to these two foreigners, add wrinkles around their mouths. Their lips obtain new vectors. They become better at kissing.
Moon learns that his birth mother had been an accomplished dancer who died in a car accident on her way to a performance. He imagines her body, the source of his life, crumpling between the soft seat and the metal wall of the car, every golden drop of dance squeezed out of it. He begins taking dance lessons. But he quickly outgrows teacher after teacher. So he decides to take all of it, art, upon himself. Y/N pushes their furniture aside so that he has more room to practice. She sits in a corner and admires the rapidly expanding vocabulary of his body. They are both shocked by whom he could have been all along. He even composes strange and innovative shapes in bed. She tries to fit her own stiff body into them. Then they breathe and breathe and breathe.
“I envy you,” she murmurs, head on his chest. “Now that you know how to dance, you will move through the world differently. You see no roads. You see only kilometers of stage. So fatherless, so motherless. I love you, I love you.”
The next day, while practicing, Moon throws his arms into the air. He arches back his head to gaze at his fingers, which straighten out in the manner of an ideal gift-receiver: neither greedy nor making a pretense of apathy. What happens next is a feat of dance that defies description. Y/N, who is hungry to find out everything about her life, senses that the entire range of her possible knowledge lives in this dance move. The impact is oblique and vast, instead of pinched and certain; it seems to her that brushes with the truth have this quality of swathed intensity. The move does not express an emotion of measurable quantity; it is the measure itself. It is too much and nothing at the same time. Moon has oversaturated himself, yet the final balance is zero. His move is what a cup contains but not the cup itself; his move has no container by means of which excess can be conceptualized.
Whatever this move was, I was certain Moon had never struck it before. Yet I was also certain that he was the only person in the world who could.
It was dark outside by the time I published this latest chapter on Archimage. When I got up and stretched my arms overhead, I wondered if I could improvise my way toward the mysterious dance born of my fiction—the move of my Moon dreams. I gave it a try. My entire body exploded in pain. Limbs had to go where they couldn’t. Muscles were asked to tense and relax at the same time. My head behaved like its own person—one, I suspected, just released from the penitentiary. It was so hostile, so independent. Out of breath, I collapsed onto the mattress.
That night I had a dream in which my view was overwhelmed by a canine tooth jutting out of Moon’s mouth, so large and hooked that he couldn’t shut his lips over it. Otherwise, he looked the same. In the world of my dream, everyone knew about this tooth but chose to ignore it. It was so much better for our spirits to see him as beautiful.
4. Infinite in the Negative
THE 【创建和谐家园】YTICS DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIMAGE compiled an exhaustive list of the celebrities and fictional characters featured in its stories. These four-hundred-some individuals were then ranked according to the number of times they appeared as the primary subject of a work. I was shocked to find Moon in first place.
Ever since the concert, I’d learned to accept Moon exactly as he presented himself, not because I was afraid to discover some cunning boardroom scheme at the bottom of it all, but because I was sure that knowing everything would reveal nothing of importance. I didn’t need the behind-the-scenes footage of his performances; I didn’t want to go behind anything. My aim, in fact, was to sink ever deeper into the marshes of fantasy. All I required was the freedom to dream about Moon. But his first-place ranking made the disturbing suggestion that my imagination, one of the few remaining places where I felt truly free, was actually the site of my dreariest conformity. I knew my feelings for Moon were neither unique nor all that extreme, and I even viewed mass popularity as his rightful due. But writing stories about him was supposed to have represented a higher level of devotion, an elitist kink in the plain template of fandom.
For the first time, I doubted the singularity of my love and thereby its truth. I glimpsed a future where I felt nothing for Moon, as one did, with both relief and melancholy, on the cusp of a breakup. I nearly fainted from disorientation. My love, which I’d considered, not without pride, a destabilizing force, was turning out to be exactly that which stabilized me.
I stared at the list, paralyzed.