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  “You look way older than them,” she said.

  “I am not my wrinkles,” I murmured.

  The woman set aside for me the picture of Moon and then rifled through those of the other boys. She was under the impression that the photos depicted what could be achieved through successful completion of the program and wanted to know which of the boys she’d end up looking like. I tore open two packets, a charcoal mask for her and an aloe vera mask for me. There were holes for the eyes, mouth, and nose. She tipped back her head, and I affixed the black mask to her face, pulling at the corners so that the magical formula would seep everywhere.

  We went on talking in the empty theater, though with the 【创建和谐家园】allest possible contortions of our mouths to keep the masks in place. The woman told me to call her O, “like the letter.” The sound constituted the first syllable of her Korean name, which she refused to reveal in its entirety. She claimed the letter O as a pictorial expression of her hope to expand from all sides into infinity, in body and spirit. When she asked what letter I would like to be, I chose N. If the two prongs of M perfectly captured Moon’s bipedal stability, then N had to be me, one-legged and doddering.

  “Anyway,” O said in a sad voice, “what’s the use of me knowing your name if you don’t even have a face?”

  The whites of her eyes seemed to be swiveling deep inside a charred boulder.

  “Don’t be fooled,” I said. “There’s a face under here.”

  “This should feel like a masked ball,” O said. “This should be romantic. But frankly you look hideous in that mask. You seem to be peering out of your own face.”

  “When am I not peering out of my own face?” I asked.

  “I’m starting to believe that the mask is a layer of skin sloughing off. Underneath you’re raw. I’d have to wait for the skin to grow back and harden. Only then could I kiss you on the cheek. I guess I could kiss you on the lips right now. But maybe the lips are always raw. That’s why they’re pink and easy to tear.”

  O leaned in to test her theory. When she was an inch away, she stopped. She gagged.

  “You 【创建和谐家园】ell like a lovely tree, but you look like an emergency-room patient who will never be the same.”

  * * *

  WE SPED THROUGH the city in the dark of night on O’s white moped. We decided to be around each other a lot until one of us stabbed the other in the back.

  “But if you do, I’m sure you’ll have a good reason for it,” I shouted over her shoulder.

  “Same,” O shouted. “I’m happy that we trust each other enough to make stabbing in the back possible. There aren’t many people who could stab me in the back. They wish.”

  I tightened my grip on her waist and looked over her right shoulder. We were still wearing the masks. In the 【创建和谐家园】all rearview mirror, I could see O’s mask drying and curling up around the edges, exposing her chin. But I seemed to be seeing more of her neck instead of her face, as if her face could only ever be that which hid behind the mask.

  I had no idea where we were. As the moped moved at high speed toward a place where we could get dinner, the city unfolded itself with ruthless fecundity, revealing one crowded district after another, thickets of dazzling detail. When I felt O’s stomach twitch with hunger under my hands, yet another plane of details, right up against my skin, entered my awareness. I understood nothing. In that moment I experienced my confusion not as a nefarious external violation—to jar and debilitate me—but as living on and through my body. The headlights on the opposite side of the road grew in intensity, but just when they seemed impossible to endure with the boiled eggs of my eyes, they abruptly disappeared. The lights repeated this process of total existence and total nonexistence.

  “You are so good at moving fast,” I shouted.

  “Driving a moped is the easiest thing in the world,” O shouted. “Keep your eyes fixed on a single point in the horizon. Don’t look anywhere else. If a truck is about to crash into you, ignore it. If a plane is falling out of the sky, ignore it. Look straight ahead and squeeze the power. Do not change course. The world will change for you. You are at the center of the universe. You can’t make a single wrong move.”

  We wore no helmets, having decided that if the moped hit a bump and threw us off like missiles, we should simply strike the pavement and explode. As we, two masked riders, pulled onto a crowded street, people gaped at us. O brought the moped to a stop, tore off her mask, and glowered back. She looked like she’d been working down in a coal mine. Her sooty face was even further from how normal skin should look, but the pedestrians appeared relieved by the mere fact of an unveiling.

  The street was lined with clothing shops and food stalls, their wares pouring out into the open. There was so much of the same thing everywhere. But when I generalized my gaze, the street became a spectacle of colorful disorder from which haphazard details emerged, including the mystical void in people’s eyes during the millisecond between looking away from their friends and looking down at their phones.

  I unhooked my legs from the moped and crossed the street. Lying on the ground was a life-size cardboard figure of Moon standing and waving. Propped up around him were the four other boys, manning the entrance to a co【创建和谐家园】etic shop, all wearing pastel cardigans and white face masks just like mine. Of course, only Moon possessed the bodily dialectics to know how to stand up and lie down at the same time.

  “Who’s that?” O asked, coming to my side.

  “It’s Moon,” I said.

  “But how can you tell?”

  Before I could stop her, she bent over, pinched the side of Moon’s head, and ripped away the top layer of cardboard. Most of his face disappeared with it. Underneath, there was only brown corrugated paper. Horrified by what she’d done, O turned to me with Moon’s face pinched between two fingers, unable to let go despite finding the thing revulsive. At that moment, a uniformed man emerged from the store, snatched up the cardboard figure, and threw it into the back of a box truck parked on the curb. O and I peered inside: more cardboard figures of Moon, alongside torn-up posters and greasy pizza boxes, all featuring his image.

  “He’s being wiped out,” O said, dumbfounded. “Look, there’s a Moon-themed wall calendar for the upcoming year. He’s being extracted even from the future. What happened? Why aren’t you allowed to see him anymore?”

  “He retired,” I said. “He might never appear in public again.”

  “So you have nothing left to love?”

  “I never loved these kinds of Moon.”

  “Then what’s left?” O insisted. “What is the right kind of Moon? You have to find the right one before they wipe that out, too.”

  As we sped away on her moped, I looked over O’s shoulder and saw my white-masked face in the mirror. I pushed it into the crevice between O’s shoulders and easily rubbed off the desiccated sheet. Once free, it whipped past my head. I looked behind me. The mask was a tiny ghost, illuminated by headlights, buoyed by the air tunnel of machines in groaning movement. I turned back around, heaved myself up, and pressed my slimy cheek against O’s. We’d decided to just order in at her place. We shouted at each other about what we wanted to eat. In the mirror, I could see our differently colored faces 【创建和谐家园】ashed against each other, our hair flying out as one tangled mass, our two mouths gaping in vociferous discussion. I imagined we composed one side of an invigorating debate with the black night into which we were speeding.

  * * *

  O LIVED ON the sixth floor of a high-rise. From the vestibule, I could see to the other end of the apartment, where there was a veranda—an enclosed porch barely large enough for a drying rack occupied from one end to the other with white sleeveless undershirts. The sliding glass door to the veranda was open. It was an odd little nook, neither here nor there: in one moment, it struck me as a creeping encroachment from the outside world, and in the next, the apartment seemed to be exiling this tiny room, slowly pushing it over the edge. Beyond, in the darkness, I could see the lit-up windows of the apartment building across the way, though nothing of the broader structure itself.

  Cicadas were droning in full chorus. The noise swathed my senses like chainmail, delicate yet impenetrable. I could distinguish a finer pattern within the wash of noise: a nasal ascent, three short repetitions, and a buzzing falloff. Hundreds of cicadas had latched onto the trees clustered at the base of the apartment building.

  “I’ve never lived in a place that sounds like this,” I said with admiration.

  “I don’t even notice the cicadas anymore,” O said. “I’m glutted. In fact, it’s when they abruptly go quiet that I jerk awake in the middle of the night.”

  When we moved deeper into the apartment, we found a woman lying on a leather couch with her eyes shut and a pla【创建和谐家园】a screen playing the evening news on mute. The woman wore a black shift that exposed the waxy luster of her shoulders. O sat down on the edge of the couch and lightly shook her by the upper arms. The woman’s lashes, loaded with mascara, struggled to disentangle from each other as she opened her eyes.

  “You’ve been sleeping all day,” O said reproachfully.

  The woman was closely watching O’s mouth.

  “Then give me something to do,” she said. Her voice had the wobbling delicacy of a foot balancing on a rope. “Something important. I’m sorry, but I despise hobbies … Have you found work?”

  O shook her head.

  “Make sure you find good work,” the woman said. “The kind of work that helps others.”

  “I’m not a helpful person,” O said.

  “I have an unhelpful daughter with a long face,” the woman mused. “Sometimes I wish you’d kill someone in cold blood so that I can prove I would still love you. I would bring you Gauloises in jail …”

  “You’re falling asleep again.”

  O’s mother stood up and 【创建和谐家园】oothed down her dress. She was even taller than O. She disappeared into a bedroom. We could hear her sliding open a window. Then another. The droning of the cicadas acquired a new dimension. I had to raise my voice:

  “What is she doing?”

  “I’m not sure,” O said, watching the door with unease. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to bear the noise. She had an accident last year, and now she can’t hear a thing. But her one wish is to hear the cicadas again. It’s hard to believe there was a time when she despised the noise … She simply couldn’t get used to it. She drifted through every summer in a haze of exhaustion, and nights would pass without a wink of sleep. Now she sleeps the entire day away.” O pressed my arm. “Come on, let me show you how I live.”

  Her room was a narrow cuboid without windows. It was essentially a hallway with a bed. Leaning against the wall were dozens of paintings in various states of completion.

  “You make pictures,” I said in surprise.

  “No,” O said. “The pictures deign to be made by me. That’s how desperate they are to exist.”

  The largest canvas in the room was almost as high as the ceiling and composed of thick black strokes. I drew near the painting, reminded of a recurring dream in which I found myself in free fall through darkness so total, so encompassing, that I couldn’t experience myself as being in movement and consequently felt no fear.

  “Before I started painting,” O said, “I’d spent all of my time doing one of three things: distracting myself, preventing matters from getting any worse, or obliging a person who meant nothing to me. What was I safeguarding myself for? I longed to put my life at the feet of a tremendous conviction, but not for some obvious hugeness, like a religion or a political movement. I refused to be drafted into any cause. I wanted a passion so totally mine that no one else could possibly have it. So totally mine that if I didn’t exist, then the passion itself couldn’t exist. I wanted a central yes.”

  “A central yes,” I repeated. “What are you saying yes to?”

  “Consider the cicadas,” O said. “There’s the droning of the cicadas, as a technical phenomenon of sound waves. Then there’s the mystery of the noise, its vehement formlessness. Neither of these things can be painted. I paint what lies in between. When I paint, I am saying yes to something that can be neither agreed nor disagreed with.”

  “Your yes is a no that takes a long time to say,” I said.

  “Moon, backwards, begins with a long no. Moon is your central yes.”

  I turned away from the painting and was startled to find O standing right behind me.

  “How can you be so sure?” I said. “It’s strange. I think you’re more sure than I am.”

  “Don’t say that,” she said. “I’m not more sure than you. I’m sure only as much as you are. I’m warning you. If you don’t make good on your promise, I won’t be able to look you in the eye ever again.”

  “What promise? Did I ever make a promise?”

  “You’re being disingenuous. You can’t bear your own seriousness. Look at you. You’re falling into a delicious languor. You like being in my room too much. I must be careful. I must alienate you. There is weakness in you, weakness from which springs the hope that I’ll speak to you on the level of reason so as to rescue you from your tortured fascination.”

  “But what am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to find Moon. I can’t even be sure he’s still in the country.”

  “In some sense, you’ve already found him,” O said. “That’s what you refuse to understand. You pretend he’s somewhere else, somewhere distant from you, to avoid the greater task, and all the more difficult for it, which is to conjoin with him. Only once you recognize this can you empty your heart so that he can fill it completely.”

  “If I’ve already found him, then what is this separation I feel? This dissatisfaction?”

  “It’s the pain of not knowing what to do with what you’ve found. It’s the wicked urge to control the situation, when what you must do is submit, perfectly and patiently.”

  “In order to see him, I have to believe,” I said with sudden clarity. “I’ll find him because I always knew I would. My search is but a 【创建和谐家园】all consequence of my conviction. All I’m doing is knocking on a door behind which he’s been waiting for me.”

  O’s mother entered the room, golden hoops shaking wildly from her lobes, as if she’d just been vigorously saying no to someone. She gestured at me to move aside. She lifted the black painting and laid it against another wall, revealing, to my surprise, a window where the painting had been. When she opened this window, the droning of the cicadas no longer simply filled up the apartment; it was a foot stomping on the side of a cardboard box and turning the whole thing inside out.

  O was moving her mouth, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Unlike her mother, who couldn’t hear because she lived in a tomb-like silence, O and I were deafened by too much of the wrong noise.

  * * *

  THREE MONTHS HAVE passed since Moon left to train at the entertainment company. Y/N is standing in the crowd at his debut concert. Moon runs onto the stage with flushed cheeks as if called out to battle, flanked by a boy on either side. Y/N shouts his name like she used to whenever he would step off a train and fail to spot her among the strangers waiting on the platform. But now, she’s not the only one calling for him, and she finds herself shouting in the same way as the others—as pure release, without any hope of recognition.

  She becomes Moon’s fan. She listens to his music as she packs up his old clothes for donation. She takes down pictures of them on vacation and puts up posters of Moon wearing an outfit that looks cold to the touch, like the inside of an industrial refrigerator.

  When old friends call to ask if she’s “all torn up” or “dead inside” after the breakup, she says no and explains why. When these friends question the prudence of trading in a real-life 【创建和谐家园】 lover for a boy star who doesn’t know she exists, she says, “As a human being who cannot live without love, I know full well that I have exhausted my options on this disappointing planet. The question is no longer ‘Who are the people who will accept my unusual love?’ but rather ‘How do I make my love more unusual and more unacceptable?’ ”

  Her friends hang up with a bad taste in their mouths.

  The next day, there’s a knock on her door. She’s expecting her new friend O. But she finds a stranger standing in the hallway.

  “It’s me, Moon,” he says.

  She tries to shut the door in his face, but he holds it open with his shoe and sputters into nervous laughter. Y/N is alarmed. There have been reports of a madman in Seoul who seeks out women living alone and manages to convince them that they in fact know and love him. “Remember that time we kissed for so long in the dark that we started kissing our own arms without realizing it?”—specificities like that. The madman preys on women who can’t tell the difference between their dreams and reality. Y/N, in honor of Moon, tells herself that she must stay rooted in reality, which is to say, in the realm of eternal distance from him. Serious fan that she is, she must not delude herself into thinking he would show up at her door and court her.

  Y/N grabs the pan that’s still hot from lunch and threatens to hit the man with it. He raises his hands and cries out in fear. Then he turns his face away. His quiet sobs suggest defeat. Y/N starts to feel sorry for him, this man who wants to play the part of lover so badly that any woman will do.

  O comes down the hallway.

  “Oh my god,” she says. “He’s back.”

  “Do you know this guy?” Y/N asks.

  “Have you lost your mind?” O says, taking the man by the shoulders and pushing him close to Y/N. “It’s Moon.”

  Disturbed, Y/N slams the door in both of their faces.

  The next day, she receives a letter from the entertainment company that manages Moon, offering her a job as his makeup artist. She rejects the offer right away. She doesn’t want Moon to be her job. Honestly, the idea doesn’t even titillate her.

  Instead, she begins a project of her own. The entertainment company recently collaborated with a toy company on a mass-produced line of Moon dolls. Y/N buys one. She lays the plastic thing on her desk and opens a tool kit. She tweezes out every strand of the doll’s hair, rubs down its face with sandpaper, and strips off its clothes. Then the real work begins. Y/N plugs in new hair, chisels out a new face, and sews together a new outfit. In the end, the doll looks more like Moon than Moon does.

  7. Moonchildren on Earth

  ONE AFTERNOON, AS I WAS about to leave my apartment to meet O, I turned off the lights and took one last look around the room. I was struck by the crisp image framed by my window, namely of office workers taking a 【创建和谐家园】oke break down below on the sunlit plaza. I had the strange feeling that I could not look out the window, that I could only look at it. The view had the flatness of a computerized reproduction.

  A figure broke off from the group of 【创建和谐家园】okers and drifted onto the street. It was O, hands shoved into her pockets and cigarette dangling from her lips. She had binoculars hanging around her neck. She wanted to help me find Moon.

  We first took a walk along the main street in my neighborhood, where men in dirty work overalls crouched in front of their auto shops and gazed across the street at stylish young couples migrating from café to café in jeans with deliberate holes. We passed my favorite of the workers, a middle-aged man who always sat with his colleagues in the back of a pickup truck parked in front of their auto shop. His brown hair possessed incredible volume, like hundreds of little lives reaching for the sky. The hair seemed to have been lowered onto his head from above like a crown, and he never 【创建和谐家园】iled, grimly acquiescent to this touch of beauty. We also passed the limping woman, who now regularly accosted me, despite my demurrals. But today she didn’t even glance my way, presumably because I wasn’t alone. I told O about her.

  “Of course,” O said. “They find people like you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You’ve got permanent bags under your eyes,” she said. “You look like you haven’t slept since you were born. But the rest of your face is as fresh as a baby’s. That woman thinks you’ve been waiting your whole life to believe in something, and she’s ready to tell you what it should be.”

  We headed for the waterfront where Seongsu-dong was hemmed in from the south by the Han River. I led O to a vast concrete platform that sloped down into the water. Most evenings, I lay on my back on this platform as the sun set, thinking about how Moon must be somewhere to the east, west, north, or south of me.

  For a few minutes, O and I couldn’t hold a conversation because we were hyperventilating, taking advantage of the fact that it was one of those rare days when the city’s air quality, according to our phones, was “good” instead of “hazardous.” Still, I refused to switch on the air purifier in my apartment. I couldn’t imagine how such a machine might work without spewing incredible toxins of its own, and I resented this extravagantly roundabout way of being killed.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to put thousands of air purifiers out on the street and turn them on all at once?” I said. “It’s pointless to live inside a room of good air if that room is inside a world of bad air.”

  “This is why I respect chain-【创建和谐家园】okers like myself,” O said. “I make my own body a room of bad air.”

  “Don’t you have an air purifier in your room?”

  “Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Being human is like that.”

  I directed O’s gaze westward to Namsan Tower, which stood atop a mountain some kilometers away. Everywhere I looked in Seoul, should my sight be clear of high buildings, I could see mountains in the distance. Even when I didn’t see them, I knew to remember them. I told O that every time I stood on this platform late at night, when the river’s perimeter could be discerned only by means of the artificial light that emanated from the surrounding traffic and buildings, I tried to work up the courage to walk all the way to the tower. If I could see it, then surely I could reach it. I would find a stranger there and lie with him at its base. A failed boxer type. As he lay on top of me, he would pummel the ground on either side of my face until the sun rose—I wanted that.