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I stared at the list, paralyzed.
All of a sudden, Moon’s inclusion struck me as preposterous. It was as if “suffering” or “the divine” had been mixed into a list of character names. Moon was not a character. He was a theme, a universal constant. He was greater than himself. Stretching out from all sides was the terrain of Moon, and I would pitch my tent where no one else thought to. My Moon had nothing to do with the other writers’ Moon. My Moon wasn’t the Moon of first place. It wasn’t first enough, first place. My Moon was the whole list.
* * *
DUSK WAS BRUISING the sky. I turned onto a residential street where people who could no longer be called young were disappearing one by one into buildings. These individuals affected an air of frigid beauty, as if to counteract the mortal admission of the vegetables and toilet paper bulging through their canvas bags. As soon as a door shut behind them, a golden shaft of light plunged through the stairwell, making their slow ascents visible even from a distance. In an apartment somewhere, a child repeatedly cried out in di【创建和谐家园】elief. I envied his indefatigable sensitivity, how he took no account of the increasing familiarity of whatever force was working upon him.
It was the first warm day of the year. The boys were now back in Seoul, concluding their world tour with a performance in the same stadium where they’d inaugurated their journey four months ago. I should’ve been home, watching a livestream of their final show. Instead, I was walking all over Berlin, moving in ever-enlarging circles and then narrowing in on Masterson’s block in order to give him as great a chance as possible of finding me. I knew I could’ve just called him and demanded a meeting. But I had no desire to foist my presence onto him and preferred to make my body shamelessly available for the obelisk intrusion of his.
It was dark by the time I reached his street. Upbeat trance music was playing in the bar on the ground floor. Outside, the drinks menu was lit up in a glass case like an important poem. I hid under the broken lamp opposite his building. To my relief, his bedroom on the second floor was dark.
Just as I was about to continue on my way, the lights turned on. Masterson appeared at the window. Why, I thought with irritation, was he in the one place in the world where I couldn’t be? He looked down at me with a forlorn expression and raised a feeble hand to the glass. Was he trapped in the room against his will? I signaled that I would save him—how I did this was by bursting my hands apart from each other to indicate freedom and release. But then I worried he might interpret this as what I desired between the two of us, so I shyly displayed my palms, then pressed them to my chest. “Your hand—I feel it against my heart,” I was saying.
He couldn’t tear his eyes away from me. He seemed gripped by melancholic fascination. I knew I had to keep him thinking about me at all costs, for love was the act of thinking about a person in an unusual color; how we perceived the character of that color was always shifting, one moment as disgust, another moment as desire. I had to risk the former to strike the latter.
Masterson gave a 【创建和谐家园】all wave. But nothing on his face suggested he was happy to see me. I was still trying to interpret his expression when he looked over his shoulder. He moved his lips, then shook his head with a wry 【创建和谐家园】ile. Was there someone in the room with him? He stepped away from the window, leaving a perfect view of a portion of white ceiling where two strips of crown molding came together at a right angle. The mere sight of this corner, with its suggestion of a profound interiority, filled me with pain.
Suddenly, a loud slam. All I could see was Masterson’s hand twisting at the wrist to ensure the pressurized lock of the window’s side handle. I blinked hard, struggling to understand what had just happened. A white curtain fluttered into place, and the lights shut off. I staggered away in di【创建和谐家园】elief. The window had been wide open all along. He’d been there, right there. I could’ve spoken to him, I could’ve reached in a hand. That was all it would’ve taken to be with him again—to have run across the street and rolled onto my toes, arm reaching up, hand slipping in.
* * *
MOON AND Y/N have been living in Seoul for half a year now. They obtained heritage visas to be able to stay in the country. Y/N has begun working as an English tutor to the morose son of a wealthy busines【创建和谐家园】an.
On her way home from work one evening, Y/N gets off the subway a stop earlier to take a walk. She sees a young man dancing on the concrete plaza by the entrance to a park. She squints through the darkness for a better look—it’s Moon. A 【创建和谐家园】all crowd, mostly women, to her intense jealousy, has gathered around him. She stands in the back. Why hasn’t he told her about these evening exhibitions? What other secrets might he be keeping?
Moon, absorbed in his own languid movements, does not see her. He strikes his elbows against each other, bones audibly clicking, then flares them apart to reveal two fresh bruises shaped like buttons.
Y/N walks home, besieged by sadness.
She lies in bed and deletes every picture of Moon on her phone. She is sick of looking at these pictures on her way to work, cosseting herself with the prospect of seeing and touching the real thing when she’s back home at night. She recognizes that her frustration with the pictures is actually a pleasure to feel, fortifying as it does the notion of a real thing. But the real thing is not real enough. Moon himself is not real enough. She wants him too much. Her appetite is unnatural. He can’t possibly give more than he already does. Still, she wants everything he isn’t and everything he will never be. How he exists in the negative—she wants this, too. But the contradiction is insurmountable. She can never have it; that’s why she loves it; she loves what she cannot have; but she will die if she cannot have this thing that she loves not being able to have.
She wonders if she should run out of the apartment and hail a taxi to Paju. Time would pass. She would become foreign to Moon, and he to her. Only then would she return to Seoul. She would follow him around the city in secret; she would tap his phone, hack his accounts. Yes, that’s it. She must become a spy. She will witness his true self only once she has been extinguished from his consciousness.
She hears Moon’s footsteps coming down the hallway of the building. Can she really leave him? The key enters the lock. The crunch of the metal has a Pavlovian effect on her. No, she’ll stay. She throws her phone at the wall, disgusted with herself for accepting the halfway satisfaction of their relationship.
That night, she and Moon kiss for hours. Frustrated, she pulls away and says, “You are so good to me, thank you so much, but what’s next?” Two bodies sliding up and down against each other—she’s starting to see it as an act of desperation in response to the impossibility of true merging.
“Why don’t we get married?” Moon says.
“But of course,” Y/N says. “With enough children that I’m pregnant for a decade straight. And after that?”
“We can die together …”
Y/N taps her fingers on his chest with impatience.
“And after that?”
Lethargy overcomes her. Without thinking, she pushes her face into Moon’s neck and kisses it everywhere, pulling the skin gently between her teeth. She feels very much at home. She occupies herself so deeply with this corner of his body that she forgets Moon is even there.
Y/N’s lips are swollen at work the next day. Her morose student puts down his pen and asks if he can kiss her. She looks up in surprise at the boy. His face is already careening for hers. Y/N won’t turn away, she knows this in an instant.
Guilt, curiosity, and even ambition gather into a knot inside her chest as she and her student kiss over his vocabulary workbook. Their mouths sound like radio static against each other. She notices that her student is wearing the same deodorant as Moon, a brand that appeals to boys their age.
On her way home that evening, Y/N gets off a stop early to catch another glimpse of Moon. She stands in the back of the crowd and opens her eyes wide in the purple dusk. His neck is so bruised from last night’s kisses that she cannot see where it begins and ends in the surrounding darkness. His head appears to be hovering over his shoulders. So clean was her decapitation of him that his head has yet to fall in recognition.
* * *
I WAS TRAVERSING the city by foot and feeling indeterminately ill. It was hard to breathe. My abdomen was packed with a blunt loathing of strong tastes and 【创建和谐家园】ells. As I followed a current of late-night revelers down a street, I was startled to see Lise, two strangers away from me, headed in the same direction. She flinched at my recognition but continued to pretend she hadn’t seen me. Irritated by this thin ruse, I reached over and pulled her out of the crowd.
I cast a sidelong glance as we passed under a lamp on a quiet street. Bold geometries of shadow arbitrarily divided up her face. She kept jerking back the corners of her mouth in agitation, flashing her molars.
“I’m sorry if I scared you,” she said. “But it’s your own fault. You kept disposing of one place after another. I never had a chance to stay put and become a natural part of your environment. So now I’m erupting like a rude surprise.”
“What do you want from me?” I said coldly.
“Don’t be like that,” she said. “I won’t be able to bear it. Please, I want you to feel safe with me.”
“Stop it. I’m not Moon. I won’t help you live out this absurd fantasy.”
“No,” she said.
“Which part?”
“The entire spirit of it. No.”
Her chin began to quiver, the skin bunching up and 【创建和谐家园】oothing out with such rapidity that I worried this instability would spread to the rest of her face. She threw her arms around my shoulders.
“Oh, I’m so angry at your mother,” she said, leaning her head against mine. “If I were her, I would’ve never expelled you out into the world, where there’s nothing to hold onto and no place of certainty. I would have kept you inside my womb for as long as possible, even if that would’ve meant my own death.”
Somehow I’d never imagined Moon as an infant. I’d also never imagined him dying. He seemed to have come into the world already complete, and I expected him to disappear in the same way.
“Inside your mother, you were perfectly round, complete unto yourself,” Lise went on. “You wanted for nothing. But then you were born, and the nightmare began. Your body was pulled in all directions. Your arms, legs, neck, even your hair—they shouldn’t look this way. They’ve been elongated by their constant attempts to reach out and anchor themselves to anything at all on the vast plaza that is the world.”
I looked over her shoulder. We were standing at a major intersection. The big public clock gave the time. It was a terrifyingly specific number.
“I feel sick,” I said.
“Come with me,” Lise said, taking my hands. “All I want to do is cook, clean, and care for you. I won’t make any demands. You don’t even have to love me. Just let me be your mother.”
“No,” I said, pulling my hands free. “No, that won’t do.”
I staggered past Lise into a liquor store and squinted in the sudden fluorescent brilliance. I was jarred by my reflection in the window: the major features of my face were crassly brought to the surface, making me look like the bare minimum of myself. I slumped onto the glass counter, rattling all the neon plastic lighters out of their box. The man at the register said altogether they would cost twenty euros.
“Hey,” Lise said from behind me. “What’s wrong?”
I shut my eyes and tried to visualize the pain. There were bright needlepoints of shock amidst a swathe of nausea. I could see no color. The counter beneath my cheek 【创建和谐家园】elled of hands and coins.
“I don’t know what to do with the rest of the day,” I said. “I’ll go home, and then what. What do I do with all that time ahead of me. But there’s also not enough time. For what, I don’t know.”
“It’s simple,” Lise said. “You find the people you love and follow them to the ends of the earth. Nothing else matters.”
“But what if they turn around and spit at me. What if they make the kind of gesture people make at stray dogs.” I remembered Masterson at his window. “Like they’re wiping the dog off the face of the earth.”
I shook with self-loathing. The man rapped his knuckles against the counter and repeated the price: twenty euros. But then I heard Korean being spoken. I raised myself off the counter and saw, on the pla【创建和谐家园】a screen overhead, a news dispatch from Seoul. The Music Professor, dressed in an oversize red suit and black sunglasses, was making a rare public appearance before a crowd of reporters. In a colorless tone, she announced that Moon had retired after the boys’ latest performance and that her company would be providing no further details on the matter. Then, without saying goodbye, without even a bow, she slipped into the side of a black van. The newscast cut to a clip of me in a pink cape from the party some weeks ago, taking the hands of a fan with a look of beatific generosity I’d never thought possible on my face.
When I vomited all over the lighters, the man said the price still stood, twenty euros. He was right: my insides were nothing I could pay for.
* * *
NO DETAILS FOLLOWED the news of Moon’s retirement. The other boys retreated from public view and indefinitely suspended the release of their next album. Online, the turmoil was titanic. Had Moon quit of his own free will? Was he dead? Had he relocated to the moon, surrendering himself to scientific progress and betrothing himself to metaphor?
It was around this time that I finally heard back from Masterson. But it wasn’t a letter. Instead, he sent a promotional pamphlet for a company that provided therapy to people in love with someone they had “infinite in the negative” chance of developing a relationship with. The company specialized in treating individuals whose “unattainable love object” was a celebrity who had no idea of their existence.
In submission to a craven desire for some peace of mind, I decided to give therapy a try. I had a free introductory online video session with Dr. Fishwife, who was calling from his office in Los Angeles. His face hovered so close to the screen that his eyes frequently strayed out of the upper frame, leaving only his mouth in view. In isolation, his purplish lips appeared impractically ornate, like they were expressly designed to mangle sound.
Dr. Fishwife kept referring to Moon as “the recently deceased.”
“I have clients in love with people who were dead from the very start,” he said. “Those are the gnarliest cases. Count yourself lucky. It’s easier to accept a death that happens in real time.”
“Must I repeat myself?” I said. “Moon isn’t dead. He retired.”
“He’s as good as dead. Take that mindset, and you’ll recover faster.”
“I can’t recover on the basis of an illusion.”
“Don’t you understand that your entire situation is an illusion? Cases like yours are so severe that at this point all we can hope for are less severe illusions, not the absence of them.”
“He might come back.”
“And then what? Your chances of meeting him remain nonexistent.”
Dr. Fishwife tried to look caring. I minimized the window.
“It’s fine if I never meet him,” I said, staring at the ceiling. “I just like the feeling of us moving through time together. I need him there. I need to know that at this very moment he’s looking down at his hands somewhere in the world. It’s possible that I might’ve figured him out all wrong, that my imagination has turned him into an absurd caricature—even then, I need to know that I’m doing all of this fallacious work in reaction to something that’s real.”
“You don’t need him back. You don’t even need him alive. Just pretend he’s the main character of your favorite movie, and now this movie’s over.”
“No,” I said. “I’m tired of experiencing reality as that which happens strictly to me. My 【创建和谐家园】all life can’t possibly encompass all of human experience.”
I could hear Dr. Fishwife paging through his notes.
“Your personal history,” he said, “does indicate a high risk of falling prey to another kind of unattainable love object: the literary protagonist who commits unusual acts of willpower, frequently to his own detriment. Keep working with me, and I can teach you how to read novels like a women’s studies professor instead of a strange, dreamy child.”
“I didn’t read about Moon in a book. I saw him at a concert once. And there are people who’ve worked with him. They say he 【创建和谐家园】ells like grass just after rainfall.”
“Exactly. He’s real. So he deserves better than the feelings you purport to have for him.”
“Excuse me. I never purport.”
“You’ve settled for a comfortable distance from him so that you can yearn without suffering. Sorry, but you’re not in love. You’re a fan. Boring, lethargic, overfed. If you really loved him, you’d be in Seoul right now. You’d be walking the streets day and night in search of him. The magnitude of the task would crush you until you became a ball of pulp containing just your heart. All other organs—crushed into dysfunction.”
I was too stunned to reply.
“The best way to fall out of love,” Dr. Fishwife continued, “is to realize there exists no love out of which to fall. In future sessions, alongside a regimen of organic probiotic supplements, we can tackle the self-contempt that lies at the heart of your addiction to pursuing love where there is none and masquerading as a foreign—”
I closed out of the video session. Then I opened a map of the world and zoomed in on Seoul. I hadn’t been there in ten years. I switched tabs and booked a one-way flight.
5. Real Life
VAVRA THOUGHT I’D LEFT FOR a reconciliatory getaway with Masterson. So when I called from the airport in Incheon to say that I hadn’t come with him at all and wouldn’t be back in the apartment for at least another month, she launched into a stern disquisition regarding my relationship with Masterson, my job, and even my upcoming appointment at the immigration office. I gazed at a lone suitcase moving round and round on a carousel, deflated by Vavra’s précis of my visible life.
“Or are you there to find yourself?” she asked, suddenly hopeful.
“What?” I said. “No.”
On the bus to Seoul, I sat beside a man returning from a business trip that, as far as I could tell from his phone call, had mostly perturbed him. I could hear the mollifying peeping of his wife on the other end. “I know, I know, I know,” he said. “I know, I know, I know.” As soon as he hung up, he fell so deeply asleep that it made me uncomfortable, like he was telling me too much about himself.
I drew aside the little curtain at my window. The proportions were startling. Row after row of perfectly rectangular apartment towers—thirty floors on average—obscured my view of a mountain range. Entire families were sitting on leather couches as high up as mountains. When the Han River appeared alongside the elevated track of the highway, I was shocked by its breadth. The river was a giant black snake with a muscular back, winding through the constructed landscape with a calm magnanimity I found menacing.
I disembarked at the foot of an overpass in Seongsu-dong. My uncle, whom I hadn’t seen in years, was waiting in his car. He drove to a four-story building with a gray-tiled facade 【创建和谐家园】udged by exhaust fumes. On the first floor was a restaurant that specialized in army stew, a restaurant that specialized in knife-cut noodles, a coffeeshop where one could sit, and a coffeeshop where one could not sit. In the basement was a 【创建和谐家园】oky pool hall. In the corner of the building’s top floor was a structure that appeared to have been added as a hasty afterthought: it had corrugated walls and was shaped like a cargo container. This, my uncle said, was where I would be staying. The studio apartment was on temporary loan from my uncle’s cousin’s son, who was away on compulsory military service. “Peace,” I kept imagining this distant relation of mine muttering to himself as he went about his duties. “What I seek is peace.”
My uncle, who worked for an electronics corporation, had to return to the office, but he came up for a quick survey of the apartment. It was June. We kept murmuring that we couldn’t believe how hot it was. Incre【创建和谐家园】ty seemed to be our last, but totally useless, line of defense against the monstrous power of an externality. Our mutual perspiration made us shy. We didn’t know each other well, but our bodies blithely forged ahead with their self-disclosures. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he bent over with a wad of tissue paper to mop up his sweat from the floor.
After my uncle’s departure, I stepped out of the building for a walk, but I’d barely covered two blocks when I was accosted by a middle-aged woman.
“Your eyes are so bright,” she said.
I was unsure if I should reply, or wait for more. There was nothing about her appearance that could help me deduce an intention from her words. She wore plain clothes and no makeup; she had the jaundiced aura of a long-suffering mother. I thanked her and walked on, but she joined me at my side. I noticed she had a limp.
“There is kindness in your eyes,” she said. “But there is also sadness.”
“What do you mean?” I asked warily.
“Let’s go somewhere and talk.”
“About what?” I asked, relenting again to my curiosity.
Encouraged, she grabbed my arm and tugged with surprising strength.
“Come this way. I’ll explain when we find somewhere quiet.”
I shook myself out of her grip and turned back for the apartment, too rattled by the encounter to continue my walk. I looked over my shoulder and saw her limping after me with an ingratiating 【创建和谐家园】ile, though seemingly without any expectation of catching up, which suggested she was confident she’d find me again.
I didn’t see a single neighbor for the rest of the day. I only heard their rapid footsteps down the hall when they returned from work in the evening, then the 【创建和谐家园】ug beeps of their electronic door locks. But the man who lived directly across from me hobbled in and out multiple times with the help of what sounded like a walking stick. His tread expressed great determination, even valor. I was certain he’d been a sedulous lover in his youth. He kept his front door propped open with a large plastic tub of kimchi, facilitating the travel of cigarette 【创建和谐家园】oke and the noise of the evening news all the way into my room. At one point, he blasted Beethoven’s Fifth.
My uncle, who lived much farther south, called to check in. In my contusive Korean, I said the hurdles were minor but many. “I’m just very ignorant,” I said in abstract summary. My uncle was appalled by this self-designation and said I should never call myself that in public. The Korean word for “ignorant” apparently sounded much harsher than I’d realized. In decades of using the word, I’d never heard it in a particularly derogatory way and wasn’t sure, despite my uncle’s remonstrations, that I ever would. To my added confusion, he was either shocked or baffled by my questions about the city, and he seemed to respond to them thematically without answering directly. Only after we hung up did it dawn on me that I’d been asking my yes/no questions in an intonation signaling declarative statements. Everything I wasn’t sure about—he’d thought I was expressing with absolute certainty.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, I boarded the subway at Seongsu Station, having heard about a 【创建和谐家园】all restaurant in Gangnam where the pack of boys had been regulars before making their debut. I stood before the double doors of the subway car. Seated to my right was a woman holding on her lap a pizza box winsomely tied with a yellow ribbon. Above her head was an ad for a plastic surgery clinic, whose patients’ before-and-after pictures suggested that the ideal man should appear incapable of crimes of passion.