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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.
The train sped along an elevated track. Out the window was a sea of quadrilateral rooftops, all painted in the same vivid green, so that it appeared as though a fertile landscape had been cleanly sundered by plate tectonics. On one rooftop, a man 【创建和谐家园】oking a cigarette was crouched before a line of laundry. His other hand kept a lighter flicked aflame. As a white bedsheet flapped at his back, he stared up at a continuum of pure blue, taut like a balloon, such that I felt he could raise the lighter and burst the whole sky.
When I emerged from the subway station in Gangnam, the boys began to appear everywhere, on posters and ads and screens, even on the buttons pinned onto the backpacks of uniformed schoolgirls. A dizzying array of products made use of Moon’s visage: fried chicken and amusement parks, massage chairs and checking accounts, every instance of him only serving to materialize the statement “Moon is not dancing” and absurdly expecting people to pay for it. I wasn’t happy to see him. On the contrary, I was scandalized by the vulgar coincidence of the cityscape with my private passion.
I found the restaurant on a quiet alley. There were no normal diners. There were only fans, sitting on the floor at low tables and taking pictures of the walls and ceiling, which were completely papered with images of the boys. I happened to arrive as a party was leaving the boys’ usual table, now bolted into the floor to affirm its sanctity. Everyone in the restaurant kept taking pictures of me to take pictures of the table where the boys used to sit. I thought about covering my face to keep their photos sanitized of my pungent individuality, but they happily clicked away.
I was deep at work in my Mooncake Stew, a dish that couldn’t have existed back when Moon frequented this restaurant. Floating in its spicy blood-red broth were spheres of glutinous rice cake that looked like they’d freshly buckled out of someone’s joint sockets. I pretended to be Moon, unknown and disheveled, tired from practice, huddled over my bowl, but whenever I came up for air and was confronted by the wall of pictures ahead, I saw the star I’d already become.
A blue-haired foreigner suddenly sat down across from me.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said in Korean. “I just want to know what it was like for our boys to sit here.” He peered over into my bowl and laughed. “I knew it. I knew you also loved Moon. You’re in his seat.”
“You can sit here as long as you don’t confuse me for Moon,” I said.
“No offense, but I would never confuse you for Moon. Especially in these times.”
The man affected a conspiratorial look. He was good at being redundant with his face. I asked if he was referring to Moon’s sudden retirement, which, I added, amounted in seriousness to the disappearance of a country from a map. The man was gratified to confirm that I belonged to the same Moon-loving “faction” as him.
“Better enjoy this while you can,” he said in a low voice, gesturing at the walls. “Rumor has it, they’ll be removing every image of Moon from the city. Soon it’ll be as if he never existed. That’s why my team and I have pledged remembrance until the day we die. We’re having lunch together right now. Join us. I like you. I like how you like Moon.”
I followed him to the other side of the restaurant. His “team” turned out to be a couple, also foreigners, who were in no state to acknowledge my presence. The man and woman were sitting cross-legged facing each other with all twenty fingers knotted into a large ball between them. One would utter “Moon,” and then the other would pause in contemplation before uttering “Moon”—it went on and on like this. I heard “Moon” so many times that the word began to pri【创建和谐家园】atically splinter into cousin sounds.
“Moan.”
“Mown.”
The three of them had met on an online forum about Moon, the blue-haired man said, and when they convened in person for the first time, these two fell in love right away. Prior to meeting each other, their passion for Moon had driven away lover after lover. These former lovers, being “pagans,” hadn’t understood how they could be loved in parallel with Moon. The man and woman hadn’t quite understood it either. Thus, romantic love up until now had been a disappointment: to satisfy a lover meant to betray Moon, which amounted to self-betrayal, leading to resentment and strangulation; as soon as one branch blossomed, another withered. But upon meeting each other, the man and woman realized they could only love someone who loved Moon. In fact, they had to love Moon more than they did each other in order to sustain the bare minimum of love between the two of them. The couple didn’t even know each other’s real names. All they required for conversation was the word “Moon”—by no means, however, were they calling each other “Moon,” the blue-haired man noted gravely.
Moon’s disappearance had been near fatal for the couple. They’d exchanged invectives of astonishing cruelty as they hung from each other’s shoulders, unable to keep their balance. Without the gravitational force of Moon, the water making up their bodies had been thrown into chaos. The blue-haired man had had to intervene with a plan of action. Now the trio dedicated itself to preserving every trace of Moon’s existence in preparation for the “wipeout” to come; they had several dozen external hard drives divided between their homes.
“But the biggest question remains,” the man said. “Why did Moon disappear to begin with? Why did he turn his light off on us?”
In the beginning, they were, “to be perfectly honest,” angry with Moon. But the three decided that if they truly loved him, they must let him disappear without demanding a reason. The task that remained was to remember Moon vehemently. But how? Friends who drifted away, lovers who broke your heart—you cared less and less about such people with each passing day. So how would you bring yourself to care more and more about someone who’d disappeared?
“Mourn,” the woman in love said.
“Moron,” the man in love said.
* * *
THE BLUE-HAIRED MAN said he rarely had guests. I could see why. We were alone in the bedroom of his penthouse apartment, whose walls and ceiling were covered with posters of Moon. The man walked the perimeter and rolled the ball of his hand over the pictures to make them stick harder.
“No more white walls,” he declared.
This room, chaotically dense with Moon, struck me as the inevitable culmination of my day. But I newly felt that some distance was in order. His image should stand like an artifact in the chancel of a Lutheran church—a sturdy, difficult object that had slowly come into being in the shaggy environs of a belief system.
The man and I switched to English out of convenience. He said he could tell I was from the United States because the American product manager in his office had the same accent whenever she spoke in Korean. He himself was in the process of eradicating his accent, having devoted himself to becoming Korean since moving to Seoul a year ago. I couldn’t tell which country he was from, and I couldn’t care less. What I wanted to know was what his company sold.
“We are a global enterprise dedicated to helping the highest-achieving members of our society cultivate empathy,” he answered. “Have you heard of those companies that send subscribers a basket of fruit every month? Our idea is similar. Every month we give our clients one day in which they can pretend to be someone they absolutely do not want to be. I’m the handler who sets up the conditions under which our clients can pretend, for example, to be evicted from their home. I give them three wailing children to raise the stakes. The little girl has spots on her face, and it may be lupus. The next month, I set them up with a day of being homeless. A logical transition. We also offer a day in the life of being a 【创建和谐家园】e addict, which a lot of our clients already are, except we also take away their cultural magazine subscriptions. You wouldn’t believe what a difference that makes. We offer female clients a day in the life of having a hu【创建和谐家园】and who beats them. So astounded are they by the comparative gentleness of the actor who comes out of character at day’s end that it’s not unusual for the woman to fall in love with him. Clients rave about our program. It replenishes their well of humanity. They call their mothers. We’re single-handedly responsible for a spike in donations to children with cleft lips.”
The man’s own lips suggested that if he had labia, they’d be parched and aloof. I wondered how he could possibly love the same person that I did. Was love for Moon a universal human emotion? Whenever someone said “I love you,” were they really saying “I love Moon”?
“In any case, work has never been my priority,” the man said. “The real reason I moved to Seoul is to meet Moon. Everyone tells me I’m crazy. But there’s no doubt I have a better chance here than back home. And who knows—with so much time on his hands now, he might even subscribe to my company.”
“I see,” I said slowly. “And what would you get out of meeting him?”
“I … I want …” He fell into anxious silence. Conviction reanimated his face. “Real life. Yes, that’s what I want.” He walked up to a life-size plastic mannequin of Moon standing near his bed. “The height might be right. The face might be right. But this thing is a pathetic fake.” He gripped the mannequin by the arm and threw it to the floor. “Yawning as I listen to Moon talk about the weather—that’s real life. Not bothering to look up when Moon comes through the door—that’s real life. Standing alone with Moon in a room, like this”—he grabbed my shoulders and pulled me close—“that’s real life. I hope he’s a truly petty and boring person at heart so that I can love him in the face of it all.”
“You want to domesticate Moon,” I said. “Like a dog.”
“Yes,” he said, misreading my tone. “After a career like that, what he needs is peace and rest.”
Proximity magnified the man’s features without revealing anything new. For all the emotion with which he spoke, his giant eyes struck me as dead. When I tried to take a step back, he tightened his grip on my shoulders. There was a pliability about my flesh that perturbed me. I wasn’t sure why I’d agreed to come home with him.
“Don’t you want to meet Moon, too?” he said. “Why don’t we help each other find him? I have a map of Seoul marked with all the places he’s rumored to visit undercover.”
“I don’t know …”
“You’re telling me that if you had the chance to meet Moon, you wouldn’t?”
“Of course I would.”
“So let’s find him together. Don’t you think he’d like us?”
“That’s irrelevant,” I said, looking over his shoulder. On his nightstand was a stack of comic books with thick wads of banknotes marking where he left off last. “No, you should find him on your own. I’ll only get in your way. I don’t want real life. I don’t even want romance. Nothing horrifies me more than the idea of marrying Moon. I need something else. Piercing recognition. Metaphysics. Byzantine iconography. I don’t want to meet him; I want to have known him for years and years.”
The man responded arbitrarily with a look of tenderness.
“I haven’t been this close to another person’s body in a long time,” he said. “If we don’t find Moon, at least we would have each other.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, twisting myself out of his grip, “but in this matter there can be no consolation prize.”
* * *
Y/N’S STUDENT HAS become fanciful. He decides they will have their next session at the Gio-ji Temple in Kyoto. His parents, eager to be useful, book round-trip flights for the teacher and student. It will be Y/N’s first time in Japan.
They go straight from the airport to the temple. When she sees the moss garden, Y/N thinks she might be dreaming. The color is faded, even decomposing into yellow-brown in some patches, yet the color is richer and truer than the green of a waxy leaf. The boy leads her to a gentle depression in the moss, right beside a tree. They share the depression. Sitting on her knees, Y/N unzips her backpack and reaches in for a workbook, but the boy stops her arm with a hand. Then he lays this hand on her back and gently pushes her forward until she is lying on her stomach. His hand slides up to the back of her head, which he pushes next into the moss. A macaque screeches overhead. The two humans are silent. The boy is kneeling at Y/N’s side, as if teaching her how to survive a new medium to come, like water that is on fire.
Y/N parts her lips to breathe. She pushes out her tongue, prodding for soil between the thick ringlets of moss. Insects crawl up her buds, tasteless. Her eyes are open onto what can only be described as a dark intimation of green. She’s so close to the moss that she can’t properly observe it, but she takes pleasure in this limitation. She’s tired of her freedom. There’s simply too much of it. She’s a 【创建和谐家园】all person who lives in a 【创建和谐家园】all room, she keeps herself 【创建和谐家园】all so that tremendous events can crush her into a paste. The moss hisses right back into her face. It’s getting hard to breathe. She knows she’s trapped in place, but she feels herself going somewhere new.
She is immersed in the moss, so she cannot see it. This is how she must know Moon. She must be immersed in him, and she must not be able to see him. Sometimes, in the skin-to-skin struggle of the sexual act, she thinks she is immersed in Moon, her vision full of dark whirling abstractions, but the lovers inevitably pull apart, and in that split second of fresh separation on the mattress, he becomes, quite strangely, that which is standing in her way to Moon. She needs a different kind of immersion, one where Moon is the world that encompasses her, where Moon is the higher idea through which all of her earthly pursuits are refracted. She must stop trying to find Moon on her plane of existence.
She shuts her eyes and twists her face out of the moss, gasping for air. The light bangs and bangs on her eyelids, begging to be let in.
Y/N returns from Kyoto seared by insight. Moon must become a performer, and she must become his fan. She must encounter him through the gigantic dimensions of collective adoration. Only then will her love be properly sized. She calls the biggest entertainment company in Seoul and gets hold of a scout there.
One evening, Y/N and Moon buy a pair of codfish and let the bodies hiss parallel in the pan until the 【创建和谐家园】ell fills their tiny apartment like the spirit of a third person. As the hissing dies down, Y/N realizes that Moon has been crying for the last few minutes. He’s covered his face with a trembling fence of hands.
“This has to be our last meal together,” he says. “I must leave at midnight to learn to dance for people like you. I must leave at midnight to learn to become special, and you must stay as you are, unknown and unremarkable.”
Y/N makes a show of magnanimity. She packs up the leftover codfish for him and says goodbye.
“It would be worse if we were to separate as two unremarkable people, lost to the crowd,” she says as they hold each other on the curb. “But you will become special, even famous, so I will find you again.”
When she returns home, she realizes that the third person she’d sensed in their apartment is the star that Moon is poised to become. Every human body is capable of producing a spirit that lingers apart from it. But whether that spirit is truer or falser than the body—she has no answer.
6. At the Center of the Universe
MOON’S FORMER BALLET COMPANY WAS having a performance at a theater in Seocho-gu. On my way there, I noticed a young woman approaching me from the other end of the sidewalk. I knitted my eyebrows to express quizzical aggression, but she didn’t seem to notice, and it was only when she stopped right before me that I realized her eyes were directed far below my face.
“Those shoes,” she said.
I joined her in looking down at my loafers, which were made of two folds of cheap white patent leather that came together at the top with a shiny buckle. I’d been forced to buy them from a man selling shoes from the back of his truck when my old sneakers had fallen apart in the middle of a walk.
The woman lowered into a crouch. She gripped the vamp of my left shoe and lifted it off the pavement. Reduced to just one foot, I nearly lost my balance and had to hold the top of her head. She didn’t seem to mind. She angled her face to examine the bottom of my shoe. Dirt and choux cream clogged the trenches. She pulled from it a strand of hair that looked like it might never end. As the grotesque findings accumulated, the white patent leather acquired an increasingly strained quality.
“I’ve been waiting for years to run into someone wearing my soles,” the woman said, looking up at me.
“What is a sole?” I asked.
Quickly intuiting my foreignness, she pointed at the bottom of my shoe.
“This part,” she said. “I control the machine that shapes it. I have a job at a shoe workshop. But it’ll be closing down soon.”
She returned my foot to the ground and rose to full height. I thought she would never stop standing up—she was so tall. When she lowered her face to mine, I could see black flecks lodged in her light brown irises. Her black hair went down to her waist, and her eyebrows ended several centimeters too soon. She could’ve been either fourteen or forty. She 【创建和谐家园】elled excessively good.
“How is it possible that I know exactly how your foot feels as it presses down on the sole, yet I have no idea where you’re going?” she said. Her tone suggested that I should’ve alerted her of my plan weeks ago, when I was living on the other side of the world and had no idea of her existence.
“I’m going to the theater,” I said.
“Are you meeting someone you love? Is he waiting for you?” she asked breathlessly, her eyes hard and relentless. “For the rest of the way, will you press your hand against your heart to feel it burn in anticipation?”
Moon was never waiting for me. He couldn’t wait for someone he didn’t know. It now seemed like such a gift, to be waited for, that I couldn’t believe there had ever been people who’d waited for me, at the corner of this street at that hour, among all the possible streets and times in the world.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s waiting for me.”
“Let me come with you,” the woman said. “I want to see where my soles take you. I want to see how your life changes in them.”
She followed me to the theater and bought a ticket for the seat next to mine. She walked briskly at my side and threw a vicious look at anyone who impeded our traversal of the lobby, as if my fateful reunion could not be delayed for even a second. As we took our seats in the dark theater, I looked around. Moon, of course, was nowhere to be seen.
The red curtains drew apart, and the performance began. As I witnessed the incredible grace and precision of the ballet dancers, it made sense to me that Moon had once belonged to this world. But I also understood why he’d defected: when Moon danced, he never exhibited control without intimating the threat of disintegration; he began from a position not of strength but of mortality, and this charged his movements with epic survival. But the ballet dancers were nothing more than 【创建和谐家园】oothly running machines, noiseless and neoprene. At one point, a dancer fell on his side. The others didn’t even flinch. The man quickly righted himself, and the troupe ossified into unassailable perfection around him. I sensed the dancers silently vowing to have nothing bad happen ever again.
As soon as the intermission began, the woman turned to me.
“Where’s the person you love?” she asked.
“He’s not here,” I said.
“I thought he was waiting for you.”
“The truth is, he doesn’t know who I am.”
“He might be waiting for you somewhere else right now.”
“Like I said, he doesn’t know who I am.”
“He doesn’t need to know who you are to wait for you. You must find him. When you confront him with the full force of who you are, only then will he realize he’s been waiting for you. You have to show up and confront him with his destiny in the form of you.”
I stared at her. She observed me unprogrammatically, without a 【创建和谐家园】ile.
“Is this a method you’ve tried yourself?” I asked.
“With you,” she said.
“Look, I don’t know why you’re … like … gum. Sticking onto me.” I was having one of those moments when my Korean couldn’t keep up with my ideas. “You don’t know me.”
The woman’s un【创建和谐家园】iling only deepened. Yet she wasn’t frowning. It was a mystery to me how she pulled this off.
“Of course I have no idea who you are,” she said. “And I certainly don’t know who you’re supposed to be. You will be a series of unknowable people to me. My only measure of your continuity is unknowability. If I knew you, I would be tempted to use that knowledge to strike a certain effect on you. No, I don’t want you to be who I think you are. Anyway, don’t be so vain. I trust my soles more than I trust you. And they tell me to follow you.”
* * *
WE STAYED IN our seats after the show was over. I asked her about the long scar that ran parallel to her collarbone. She tugged aside the collar of her shirt to show how the scar wrapped all the way around her shoulder. I imagined that the scar continued circling her body until it spun off like a tail. It was from when she’d been thrown off her moped. She’d asked the man riding behind her to cover her eyes as she zoomed down a familiar road, because she’d grown tired of being so used to everything. He was the last person she truly loved.
“Despite everything I’ve been through, I still think that my loneliness is part of some character-building prologue to the joy of togetherness that inevitably awaits me,” she said. “Isn’t that funny?”
I nodded sincerely while feeling no desire to laugh.
Her scar was so thick that I felt she could train it like a muscle toward athletic excellence. Beads of perspiration gleamed in the cup of her collarbone. One droplet fell over the edge, rolled down, balked at her scar, and detoured around the ridge.
“Your pain has three dimensions,” I said.
“Let’s get to the point,” she said. “Tell me about the person you love. But please—no cold facts. What I need is his existential color. How does his body change when he hears his favorite song? What kind of games do children try to play with him when he comes around? Rant about him. I won’t interrupt.”
Most of what I proceeded to say was confused and vaporous, with abrupt moments of microscopic detail. About ten minutes in, frustrated by the shameful inadequacy of my words, I pulled from my backpack the box containing the thirty-day skincare regimen. The boys’ five faces spanned the front of the packaging. They wore black shirts with deeply cut necklines, making the white luminescence of their skin stand out all the more. Even the whites of their eyes were not as white. I pointed out Moon.
“I’ve seen him before,” the woman said. “He’s all over the city.”
“And? What do you think?”
“He looks impossible.”
The box included two types of sheet masks, the first featuring aloe vera, which increased the skin’s elasticity so as to widen the user’s range of facial expressions, and the second featuring black charcoal, which darkened the user’s face before making it whiter than ever. “You are not your dryness,” the boys said in 【创建和谐家园】all copy on the box. “You are not your sebum.” They wanted to make the world a better place, and that began with my enlarged pores.
“After I use a mask,” I said, “I feel cleaner, lighter. Edited. In a month, my dead skin cells will fall away, and I’ll be left with the juicier cells underneath. Then I’ll be closer to who I really am.”
The woman took the box and held it up to my face.
“You look way older than them,” she said.