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  * * *

  A STRANGE MALAISE had fallen upon the group. Eyes had glazed over by the end of Sun’s monologue. Back in the elevator, he pressed for the seventh floor.

  We disembarked into a rehearsal room, which, after the density of the library, was strikingly bare, as if to drive home all that the boys could do with just their bodies. The four walls were paneled in mirrors. We remained by the elevator as Sun went ahead and roamed the space with his head lowered. In the glass, infinite versions of himself fell deep into thought.

  He turned to us with abrupt resolution:

  “It’s good to have you in this room with me. The truth is, the other boys and I haven’t been here in a while. Strange impulses have befallen us. We leave Polygon Plaza and wander the city for hours to press our hands against its hot concrete. We crave the truth of an easy sensation. We want to fight and desire, to have favorite things. We want the heavy fist of the world to press down on each of us and crystallize a personality into being. But everything remains at a distance. We don’t know how to meet the eyes of a stranger on the street. We don’t even know how to enjoy the weather. We’re a nail that keeps slipping out of the wall; we can’t stay involved. Having lost our primal instinct for life, we no longer have one for art.”

  A young woman broke out of her sluggishness and stared at Sun with indignation. How dare he bore her, so much so that she should forget to be astonished by his presence? A shadow crossed Sun’s face as he realized that the group was failing to grasp the urgency of his words. He raised his voice:

  “We once treated the Music Professor’s ideas like holy law. But now we wonder if she might have been wrong. You see, we’ve spread ourselves too thin. We don’t know how to reach you anymore because we don’t know where we’re starting from. This is why we’ve decided to open Polygon Plaza to you for the next six days. You may visit every floor except the tenth, from which even the boys and I are forbidden. Roam free, create at our sides—and pump us with the gasoline of your experiences. Tell us who you are. Tell us how one lives. Everything you share with us—we will express it in a unified work of art. The other boys will be joining us soon. Venus is excited to study your faces—‘like Greek sculpture,’ he said. And Mercury has fallen silent to conserve his words for all that he must say to you … Anyway, let’s drop the honorific and speak freely with one another. We are now peers in art, after all. Go ahead, make yourselves at home.”

  I took a step back, feeling as if a bowl had dropped face down on the cockroach of me. Murmurs of excitement had broken out, and a few people seemed on the verge of anxious tears. But the office worker remained as stony as ever. He broke free from the group and took a step in Sun’s direction.

  “I was afraid it would come to this,” he said. “I’ve been watching you for the last year, just you, my boy. You’re simple; it’s the beautiful truth of your character. Your fancy talk and charitable whims—they pain me with their falsity. And now you’ve really done yourself in. Why don’t we step aside and have a talk about your future? You need to be careful here. Don’t let these people put their dirty hands all over you. Who knows, they might be criminals, prostitutes, animals—”

  I escaped into the elevator and pressed for the tenth floor.

  * * *

  I STEPPED INTO a 【创建和谐家园】all room with a sweeping view. The room was identical in shape and size to the elevator compartment I’d just exited; together they formed two halves of a pyramid. I needed to take only a few steps before I could press my forehead against a sun-warmed wall of glass. I was standing at the tip of Polygon Plaza.

  I could see the world for kilometers ahead, and none of it was beautiful. Dozens of apartment complexes, all of the same dimensions and same shade of gray, thrusted out of the ground like stiff barbs of hair. I was observing from such a height that the buildings, spread across the landscape in precise rows, looked as if they were standing at my command. Beyond these buildings was an industrial power plant. There were three 【创建和谐家园】okestacks. At their base was a structure of scaffolding spangled by liquid points of light. As with the apartment buildings, the presence of humans was unquestionable, yet not a single person could be seen. From each of the three stacks emerged a column of 【创建和谐家园】oke that subsequently collapsed to the side from its own weight. The 【创建和谐家园】oke thickened along the way, darkening in color, gaining bold contour. It replenished itself with vigor. All that moved in the landscape was the 【创建和谐家园】oke. And yet there was something undead about the emission, lacking as it did a clawing desperation to survive, as well as the unpredictable outbursts of cruelty that accompanied the cycles of nature.

  I swept my gaze across the apartment complexes. Then something moved. An arm was jutting out from the top floor of a building, its hand swinging lazily at the wrist. Almost as soon as I saw it, the hand stopped moving. Then it vanished. I imagined it gliding away from the window into a dark room. Perhaps it was now doing the dishes or ironing a shirt. Inside all of these bulwarks of metal and concrete, I realized, hundreds of hands were opening and clenching, hitting and grazing, yearning to land upon a gesture of beauty, like that of a dancer. But then I pictured the buildings falling apart and disgorging these hundreds of hands, all of them grasping for something to hold onto but finding nothing but air.

  I pulled away from the glass, electrified by the conviction that Moon and I were finally in the same place—not Polygon Plaza, not even Seoul, but a place of far greater dimensions, an incalculable realm of possibility where encounters between individuals were rich and oxidizable like the gashed flesh of a peach. I could feel him there, thrumming at a distance, roaming the same wilderness as me, a fellow exile without a map. I was finally in the right place. But this place, precisely for being right, was the most daunting yet, and easier to lose my way in.

  * * *

  I HEARD THE elevator open behind me. I yielded in silence.

  Inside the compartment, the black-suited man pressed the top and bottom buttons at the same time. They blinked twice in enigmatic assent, then the elevator glided all the way down, past the lobby of Polygon Plaza and into the earth.

  I stepped out into a chamber so large that I couldn’t perceive its distant limits. It was divided into large sections, each illuminated by a hanging lamp, between which lay wide strips of darkness. I found myself standing inside a 【创建和谐家园】all rectangle of light, occupied only by a hatstand, on which hung a black leather trench coat. Just up ahead, I could see the Music Professor sitting behind a desk in an oversize blue suit. Shelves of books towered at her back. To the right was an illuminated section featuring a four-poster bed; to the left was a kitchen. This underground chamber, I realized, was the Music Professor’s apartment, one without any walls.

  She gestured at the chair on the other side of her desk in invitation. I crossed out of the foyer and into her office.

  “It’s nice up there, isn’t it?” she said. “As a child, I dreamed of living in an attic room and reading books high over my family’s heads—to be very much away. The room on the tenth floor is the belated realization of my dream. Without that room, Polygon Plaza would not exist. In all matters of my life, I design from the top down.”

  She propped her arm on the table and laid the side of her head on her hand. There was no makeup on her face, and she composed it utterly without tension, though the features themselves were biting and sharp—she was an empty firearm. Sustained exhaustion was legible in the wrinkles sprouting from the corners of her eyes, but they had a peculiar charm, a simultaneous delicacy and rigidity, a relaxation into her own contradictions. I sensed she always asked directly for what she wanted and had emancipated herself from the humiliation of rejection.

  “You interest me,” she said. “Why did you leave the group?”

  Her voice wasn’t unfriendly. I knew it would be pointless to speak without total candor.

  “I don’t want to collaborate with the boys,” I said.

  “But you must be a fan. Why else would you have participated in the lottery?”

  “I’m looking for Moon.”

  She lowered the hand that had been supporting her head.

  “Ah,” she said sadly. “You love Moon. But tell me. Might there not have been a chance of meeting him in the rehearsal room? You must’ve heard the rumors.”

  “I never believed them. I know Moon isn’t coming back. The other boys are finished; there’s no hope for them. Moon would never consent to a project like that.”

  “Such a collaboration would indeed be out of the question for him,” she said with gentle surprise. “Moon cannot compromise. But neither does he know how to make demands of others. His work is much more subtle. By simply existing at their side, he functioned as a chemical agent that intensified each boy’s most spiritually independent quality. This created those deep lines of friction only out of which a philosophical unity among individuals can be born. But now, without Moon, the boys have fallen back apart into discrete talents.”

  “You love Moon, too,” I said.

  “Not like you do,” she said. “It’s different. There were so many hours. So many cryptic turns. He could be exacting. He was in conscious possession of his former lives and sought to reconcile them in the slim envelope of his present. He single-handedly changed the direction of my work. He drained me. There were times when I refused to let him into my office. Can you imagine that?”

  “No. But I want the challenge. To love him anew. Every time.”

  “I no longer have the energy for that,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “There was a time when my anger alone could wrench me out of bed like a hand. Now I surround myself with the boys because they are so much stronger and so much more beautiful than me. They are my energy broken into magically complete pieces. But now they’re petering out, my little stars. I can’t even remember the last time they visited the room on the tenth floor. Moon, however—he went up there every morning until his last.”

  “Sun said the boys were forbidden from visiting the room.”

  “That’s a curious way to put it,” she said with a gleam in her eyes. “No, my rule is simply this: They must be summoned to the tenth floor. They must feel as if they had no choice in the matter.”

  “What’s supposed to happen there?” I asked.

  “That does not fall within my purview,” she said firmly. “Each person has their own way of receiving that which comes down. Or of reaching for that which stays above. Who can say which it is?”

  Silence fell between us. Her last words were echoing in a remote corner of the room. I was certain she lived here alone.

  “There’s something I still don’t understand,” the Music Professor said. “You said you’re looking for Moon. But if you knew he wasn’t coming back, then why are you here at Polygon Plaza?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” I said. “All I have are the places he used to be. But I know I will find him. Something happened when I was on the tenth floor. I felt myself leaving one place and entering another. Moon is in this other place, too. I’m sure of it.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “Strange,” she said. “You look like him. But there are so many people in the world that I suppose it’s only reasonable to expect a few hundred of them to look like Moon. You look like him in a sad way.” She reached over and lifted the dead ends of my white hair. “Look. Your hair is crying out for help.” She flicked crumbs off my sweater. “And have you been munching on crackers? Have you ever met a cracker that’s slimming? I think it would’ve been better for you not to look like him.”

  “He succeeds where I fail.”

  “You know,” she said in a hard voice, “he’s just a person, out in the world.”

  I sat up straight. It was my first time hearing anything about Moon’s location.

  “Where in the world?” I asked. “Please take me to him.”

  “Don’t you see how lucky you are? You don’t know Moon, so you think you could know him. Because you’ve never met him before, he’s always waiting for you in a state of existential integrity.” Her exasperation was wholesale, beyond me. “Sometimes I think it would’ve been better for Moon to have never been born. Then he would still be possible. Then he wouldn’t be all used up.”

  “I don’t want integrity,” I said. “I want difficulty.”

  The Music Professor was silent for a few seconds.

  “Show me your ID,” she said.

  I handed her O’s card.

  “So you didn’t always look like Moon,” she mused. “Have you had some work done? Nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a good idea.”

  She removed a piece of paper from the inside pocket of her jacket and held it out to me.

  “This is Moon,” she said.

  I took the paper into my hands. It was an ultrasonic image. How had I never thought to hang posters of Moon’s insides on my walls? I found the proportions, however, completely illegible. I couldn’t tell which part of his body I was looking at. Were this image to serve as a map, Moon was likelier to lose his way inside his own body than in a foreign city.

  When I tried to return the picture, the Music Professor held up a refusing hand.

  “Bring it with you later,” she said. “There’s little else I can give you that would help identify him.”

  I could say nothing.

  “I’d kill to feel what you’re feeling,” the Music Professor said, laying her head back on a hand. “That doorway feeling. To be on the cusp of experience. I’d kill to know it again. The truth is, I wouldn’t be surprised if you eventually found yourself wishing you’d stayed at Polygon Plaza instead.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked uneasily.

  She shut her eyes.

  “It’s just so much better in our heads,” she said.

  And then she went far, far away.

  9. The Sanctuary

  THE BLACK-SUITED MAN DROVE ME away from Polygon Plaza at breakneck speed. When I asked where we were going, he ignored me and turned up the radio. A woman, phoning in over a crackling connection, told the host she was ashamed to see all the shoes lined up in her vestibule, for none of them belonged to a man who loved her.

  We wound through a 【创建和谐家园】all city blighted with dilapidated buildings, then broke free onto a deserted road. More than an hour passed without any sign of human life. As the car rumbled up a grassy slope, bringing into view a lake bordered by verdant mountains, I realized with exhilaration that nature refused to consort with the wrong kind of Moon. There was nowhere for his visage to reasonably hang, nothing for him to advertise. The landscape was emptying itself of his image, sweeping away every cheap reproduction in anticipation of my arrival. I couldn’t be far now. Amidst the clean shock of grass, I would find him standing there, protruding with insolence, whole unto himself.

  The car pulled up in front of a two-story house constructed of interlocking wooden beams, with a curved black-tile roof and a stone turret—it looked as though a hanok had been stretched in all directions to assume the grandiose stature of a Victorian estate. Waiting on the porch was a middle-aged woman wearing a forbidding expression. Yet another person standing between me and Moon, I thought with icy determination as I climbed the steps. But this stranger hugged me as if we hadn’t seen each other in years.

  “How could I not admire you?” she said. “You came all the way here for love.”

  I was too startled to speak. Aggravated by her floral perfume, I tried to wriggle free. But she would not let me go. Suddenly overcome by exhaustion, I sank into her bosom with relief.

  “I rarely allow visitors to the Sanctuary,” she said. “But I made an exception for Moon, and now I’m making one for you.”

  Even as the woman pulled away, she kept our bodies close, draping my shoulders with her hands, which seemed to need a lot of rest, freighted as they were with complex rings. Her hair, dyed a violent hue of red, was coiled high atop her head, and the silk of her tight-fitting dress sighed with every move of her plump body, as if lamenting the existential precarity it had to endure in the name of abetting her beauty. She was impossible not to gawk at. In any case, she liked the attention, gamely following my eyes as they traveled down her dress.

  “Is he expecting me?” I asked.

  “I haven’t said a word. The slate remains clean. An arena in which to play out your fantasies, the chance to corner at last the elusive gazelle that is the beloved—this is all I can provide in the way of assistance.”

  “I understand,” I said with a firm nod. “If everything goes wrong, there should be no one but myself to blame.”

  “That’s the spirit,” she said, stroking my face. “You’re trembling like a foal. Has no one touched you in a while? Don’t be embarrassed. Being practiced at love is exactly what ruins it.”

  Then she extricated herself with delicacy and slapped me lightly on the cheek, as if to say enough was enough. Had she pushed me around some more, I wouldn’t have minded. I knew there wouldn’t be a woman like this for another hundred years.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Me neither.” She inhaled sharply, eyes stricken with ineffable emotion. I had to wait a worrisomely long time for her to breathe back out. Composure regained, she sashayed for the front door. “Stay close. It’s easy to get lost around here.”

  I followed her into a tastefully decorated sitting room. Moon was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was a white-haired man so severely hunched over in a wheelchair that I couldn’t see his face. He was breathing with mammalian furor, making the wheels squeak back and forth on the floor. Resting on a chaise longue beside him was an old woman with cartoonishly drawn eyebrows, the black lines careening past her temples, as though she’d been angry with herself as she’d stood before the mirror that morning. She stared ahead, slack-jawed. The couple, if they were one, did not acknowledge our entrance. No conversation was underway.

  “What’s wrong with them?” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?” the proprietress said. “There’s nothing wrong with my patients. Through no fault of their own, they’ve become children once more. People look to the future and imagine meeting their soulmate or traveling to France, but do they ever imagine having dementia?”

  She went on to explain that three demented patients lived here under her care. The Sanctuary, neither nursing home nor medical clinic, skirted the boundaries of legal propriety for a number of reasons, the foremost being that the Caregiver, as she called herself, had never received formal training in this line of work. Moreover, she refused to install the pertinent medical equipment—“no style,” she said, “and no fun at all.” True, her patients could probably eke out an extra year hooked up to the high-end gadgetry of a university hospital, but the Caregiver knew, at the bottom of her heart, they wouldn’t feel even one percent as loved as they did here.

  “In the short time they have left, I hope my patients enjoy the 【创建和谐家园】all but intense paradise I’ve created for them,” she said. “For maximal sensory pleasure, I blast the air-conditioning but keep the floorboards heated from below. My patients eat like kings. Tonight it’s lobster tail. I’m also fond of organizing unforgettable activities. I’ve seen Miss Lina on a horse …”

  She began to fuss over the man in the wheelchair, fixing his collar and 【创建和谐家园】oothing down his hair. I still couldn’t see his face, but a strand of saliva was slowly elongating from his chin. I wondered if this was a message for me, the viscous leakage of his otherwise incommunicable thoughts.

  “Moon,” I croaked. “Is that you?”

  The Caregiver turned to me with a sharp look.

  “I know love can play tricks on the eyes, but please keep my patients out of your delusional episodes. This is obviously Mister Goun. He couldn’t be someone else if he tried—so inimitable is his soul.” She raised her voice: “Isn’t that right, Mister Goun?”

  The decrepit man unfurled himself with dinosauric effort. His face was carved with wrinkles from top to bottom. He must have spent his life passionately emoting; so much love and injustice must have come his way. As the Caregiver bent over with a handkerchief to wipe the spittle off his chin, she had her lips pursed as if requesting a kiss. Here was a woman who seduced willy-nilly. She did not make discrete advances on individual men; her life was one prodigious advance, and only death could turn her down. Once finished with the handkerchief, she tucked the soggy thing into the lacy cup of her bra.

  “Mister Goun, do you know where Moon is?” she asked.

  “I want to know,” he murmured. “But I really don’t.”

  At the sound of burgeoning activity, the woman on the chaise longue rustled to life. She was so thin, I could’ve mistaken her for a single tibia swaddled in cotton. She appeared incapable of making any kind of impact on the world.

  “Moon?” she piped up. “Who the hell is Moon?”

  “Miss Lina,” the Caregiver said reproachfully. “Let’s see how well you keep your cool once Moon comes around. I saw the way you were sitting in his lap last night and making yourself comfortable.”

  The Caregiver took the handles of Mister Goun’s wheelchair and beckoned all of us out of the room. I followed at her heels in bewilderment.

  “But why is Moon here?” I asked.

  “All I know is he needed a place where he could live in peace and quiet,” she said with a shrug. “The Music Professor has an uncanny sense of people, of what they’re capable of giving one another. She knew I would leave him to his own devices, not least because I couldn’t care less about all that dancing and singing and whatnot.”

  She gave Miss Lina a spurring pat on the back, then turned to me with a look of grim disapproval.

  “On that note, I have to admit I don’t understand how you could’ve fallen for a celebrity. We’re no longer at the age for such things, are we?”