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  “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?”

  * * *

  THE CAREGIVER LED us down a corridor that went on and on, until I found it impossible to correspond the Sanctuary’s sprawling inner dimensions with the house I’d observed from outside. Space seemed to be proliferating from within. Over our heads, torrid pansori was playing at low volume. This flourish gave the Sanctuary the mannered drama of a history museum—the history of what, I could not say.

  Like the Music Professor, whom she’d known since they were schoolgirls, the Caregiver had completely changed the direction of her life a few years ago. Prior to opening the Sanctuary, she’d been a blithely unoccupied housewife with a “whorish appetite” for her own hu【创建和谐家园】and. “Happy decades,” she summed up with a frown. But then his mind had started to go, and she’d been forced to watch as the vast history of his humanity attempted to push itself through a tiny hole in the wall, only to emerge as a degraded paste. Worse yet, his illness guaranteed him the minimum sliver of consciousness necessary to recognize, on his dying day, just how badly he’d lost the game of his own life.

  “My aloneness in the world has extended my heart into strange places,” the Caregiver said. “I really had no choice but to create the Sanctuary—it’s the magnum opus of my life, one that I’ve dedicated to emotional nepoti【创建和谐家园】. I must have received some ten thousand applications, documenting dementia in all its harrowing colors, but I chose my three favorite cases and threw the rest into the trash. Now that Mister Goun, Miss Lina, and Mister Suguk are here with me, they shall be the sole recipients of my devotion for the rest of my life, and I will never have any others.”

  Being old was already bad enough, she said, but add to that an unruly mind, a roguish creativity, and one wound up like her patients—lumpy, ugly wreckage left to rot on the shores of an increasingly polyester culture.

  “Everyone wants to take, but no one has anything to give,” she said. “People are craving touch, sensation, depth. But nobody can feed them, for the same people they beseech are busy beseeching someone else. The world: a chain of beseechers. I’ve extracted my patients from this vicious cycle. I organize the world in their favor. I infuse their lives with energy in excess so as to offset the draconian imbalance they’ve had to suffer for too long.”

  I started at the touch of a skeletal hand on my arm. I turned to find Miss Lina’s vacant gray eyes in alarming proximity.

  “Have you heard from my younger brother?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, but I have no idea who your younger brother is,” I said.

  “I must find him. I must go right away.”

  She turned aside to split off from the group, only to confront a wall.

  “Well … where is he?” I asked.

  “I put him down because my arms got tired. I lost sight of him after that. There were too many people around. All of us were in a hurry to get away. Everything would be different if I’d had better arms … Are you sure you haven’t heard from him?”

  “I—”

  “Miss Lina,” the Caregiver interjected. “Why don’t you lead the way ahead? Miss Oseol is new around here.”

  As the old woman hobbled down the corridor, the Caregiver explained that Miss Lina had begun speaking of this “younger brother” when her mind had deteriorated beyond recognition. Strange how it was only when she lost her grip on the most quotidian facts that she remembered the one thing she’d spent her entire life trying to forget. Her hu【创建和谐家园】and and children had never heard about this brother before; they couldn’t even be sure he really existed. Not that their opinion mattered. They hadn’t visited Miss Lina a single time, the Caregiver noted tartly.

  The corridor finally opened onto a circular antechamber with three doors—rooms where the patients could do “whatever they want.” The Caregiver thought of these spaces as “ateliers,” cracks in a desiccated modern landscape through which her patients bloomed like wildflowers. Out in the world, her charges were called demented; here, they were lauded artists.

  She led us inside Mister Goun’s atelier. The walls were pinned with pencil sketches he’d made of some unidentifiable and protuberant object, repeated with minor variations. Had it not been for the Caregiver’s elucidation, I would’ve never guessed they were stiletto heels. Mister Goun could no longer draw a straight line. But things had been different back in the day, when he’d been a much sought-after shoe designer who knew how to give women the pleasure of feeling their legs lengthen out below them. He used to say that his ideal clientele were “haughty ladies”: transformed by his creations into beautiful but teetering buildings, they would yield at last to their true desires and crumble strategically into the right masculine arms. This had been Mister Goun’s way of engineering love stories all over the world.

  I watched as the old man wheeled himself over with surprising vigor to a glass case displaying his latest design, which the Caregiver had specially ordered for manufacture. The shoe slumped in distortion—its heel was a woeful stub, its sole four times too broad.

  “Want to try it on?” the Caregiver asked. “I think it would look good on you.”

  “It will make me fall,” I said forlornly, “and into no one’s arms.”

  Back in the antechamber, we found Miss Lina walking in circles, looking around as if she sensed something in the air. I cast the Caregiver a questioning look, but she hushed me and pressed her ear to the second door.

  This atelier belonged to Mister Suguk, whom I had yet to meet. He was “rather kooky” even for a demented person. It was hard to say what was his dementia and what was him—or perhaps he’d been demented from the moment of his birth? “Could be,” the Caregiver mused with affection. By the end of his thirties, he’d failed to publish a single one of his poems and was twice divorced. He eventually resigned himself to working as a geography teacher at a high school, where he became infamous for his “unusual” lessons.

  Mister Suguk’s work continued at the Sanctuary. Every morning, he showed up to his atelier and waited for his students to arrive. The cornerstone of his pedagogy was the requirement that every student strike up a long-term written correspondence with a peer in a foreign country. There were no parameters regarding the content. All he asked was that his students never exchange pictures, never arrange a phone call, and certainly never fly out to meet their pen pals. In class, students were required to read aloud every letter they received. It was best to leave Mister Suguk undisturbed, the Caregiver said, stepping away from the door, unless we were prepared to present the latest findings of our “research.” The old man did not take this exercise lightly; it was no children’s game. He expected his students to be transformed by their “spiritual correspondents,” these “alien visitations.” What all of this meant exactly, the Caregiver could not say—personally, she found his lessons difficult to sit through.

  “In ancient times, Mister Suguk would’ve been a bard renowned throughout the kingdom—a consequential personality,” she said. “But what is he in this day and age? Nothing.”

  The Caregiver moved onto the third and final atelier. When she opened the door, materializing a slim column of brilliant light, Miss Lina pushed us out of the way and slipped through the crack with liquid inevitability.

  * * *

  HUNDREDS OF CHERRY blossom trees were at peak bloom, clustered in such concentration that the atelier’s ceiling fell out of view. Sunlight trickled between the five-petaled beauties and cast shuddering polygons of light on the ground.

  Up ahead, Miss Lina wound between the trees, then disappeared from view. The Caregiver, meanwhile, strolled at a leisurely pace far behind me, hand outstretched to caress the trees she’d planted for the old woman. Because the trees grew so close together, there was no way to tell when the pink bounty of one ended and when another began. A cloud of imperceptible bounds seemed to be hovering just over my head. But sometimes the sun hit just right and made the blossoms flare into a passionate hue of violet. In those moments, they acquired the carbuncled solidity of flesh, and I felt like a cell pulsating through a giant lung.

  I came upon Miss Lina standing under a tree. I could see her only from the back, her shoulders lurching from the savage force of her tears. I thought she was alone, but two pale shapes began to creep around her waist. They were hands, slowly reaching for each other, then clasping at the 【创建和谐家园】all of her back. Someone was rising to their feet, their black hair cresting over the old woman’s head.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you,” Miss Lina said. “You wouldn’t believe all the people and places I’ve had to encounter on my way here. As soon as I lost you, my life did its utmost to distract me from finding you again. People needed me here, other people needed me there … But how did you manage all by yourself? Let me see. My goodness, you’ve gotten so big. Now you’ll have to carry me around. And your face—what a me【创建和谐家园】erizing surface … You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive. I would have waited for you my entire life.”

  My heart shot forward. The second voice had the ringing purity of a bell. It wasn’t a human voice, but the airy apotheosis from which all other voices were gristly deviations.

  The boy rested his chin on Miss Lina’s shoulder. He looked just like Moon. He wore nothing more than white linen trousers and a white T-shirt, as if to offer himself up for controlled observation. Indeed, the details I’d always loved were there: the plush lips, the wide cheeks, the slat-like eyes. But I couldn’t advance from thinking he looked like Moon to thinking he was Moon. In fact, his resemblance possibly proved he wasn’t Moon. Similarity precluded equivalence: if the boy were Moon, I’d never say he looked like Moon, just like I’d never say that I looked like myself.

  There was a twig poised under my foot; I applied pressure to see what would happen. The boy turned his head at the sound. For the first time in our lives, Moon was looking at me. I’d always thought that as soon as he was within reach, I would have no choice but to announce that I loved him. But I did not run for him, I did not say a word. Now that we were in a room together, I found that I didn’t know how to feel love for him with visceral conviction, having experienced this love so much across distance, through yearning. I was no less certain of my feelings, but they seemed to sit on a shelf higher than the hands of my immediate experience could reach.

  He looked away, expression unaltered, as if my presence were no more to be expected than one of the trees. With a tremor, I wondered if he’d seen me at all. But there was no doubt that if I took three loping steps, I, too, could hold him in my arms. A gust of wind broke through the atelier, sending thousands of blossoms into susurrous abrasion. Swathed in that sound, which seemed to live through and beyond this forest to span ecosystems I’d never experienced before, I found it hard to believe we were in the same room.

  “Let me take another look,” Miss Lina said. “Can it be? I’ve missed you so much that I can scarcely believe I’ve found you.”

  She patted his face all over, as if trying to find a tumor of authenticity underneath.

  “Don’t doubt yourself,” Moon said. “I’m exactly who you think I am. I don’t know how to be anyone else.”

  * * *

  I LAY IN bed in the guest room, staring at the richly embossed ceiling, where cherubs were nuzzling thick tangles of grapes. It was so hot that I’d stripped down to just my underwear.

  Earlier that evening, instead of heading for dinner, I’d idled in my room before the mirror, alternately intoxicated and horrified by the fact that Moon had seen my face, its raw details, the patent emotion of my eyes. When I finally made it downstairs, I could hear muffled voices through the door to the dining room—everyone was already inside. But I couldn’t bring myself to enter. The idea of chirping “Hello, nice to meet you” to Moon over a meal made my stomach turn. And what would we talk about? I couldn’t ask like some flappy-mouthed reporter why he’d retired. What I needed were sinuous lines of poetry charged with enigmatic meaning—but not so obscure that he would be forced to request a clarification. I refused to make Moon complicit in the bungling of my own drama. Roundly defeated, I’d slunk away and returned to my room.

  Now I lay on my back, immobilized by remorse, staggered by my own stupidity.

  I was finally on the cusp of sleep when the footsteps began. I jerked awake. Someone was walking slowly in a straight line overhead, the floor creaking with every step. I knew it was Moon. The quiet resolve, the sensual lassitude—it had to be him. The noise weakened as he strayed beyond the demarcations of my room. But then he returned. He came to a sudden stop about a meter to my right—then resumed his steps, crossing over to the opposite side. Was he staying in the attic? If so, his room seemed to be twice the size of mine. My chamber, fit for a child, was encompassed by his from above.

  I held my breath and lay still, awakening to a force of passion I hadn’t felt since my arrival.

  He moved back and forth over my room, his pauses occurring more and more in my proximity. My ceiling, his floor—this panel of wood had been set in place so that we wouldn’t crash into each other with the violence of desire. The world, with its stolid rules concerning the final balance of all matter, would never let the amas【创建和谐家园】ent of our energy go unchecked. Would we always have to be so apart? Yet we gave each other meaning. I was his hell, he my heaven. We were indispensable to each other in our separation. I understood this with new clarity now that we were together in this house, closer than we’d ever been before. Perhaps this panel of wood, precisely for dividing us, was the only way to sustain the strength of our connection. But what would happen if we destroyed it for good?

  Moon stopped directly overhead. There was a muffled noise, like the rubbing of two dishcloths against each other. Was he lying down on the ground, to bring the entire length of his body closer to mine?

  I slipped off my underwear. I gazed past my chin at my body. Anything could happen to it—a knife could come flying out of the darkness, the ceiling could fall without warning. I ran my hands all over my stomach with admiration and pity both. My hands—where should my hands go next? I clawed at my upper arms as though I were a stranger to entreat. I was not enough for myself, my body was not enough, yet I needed it, I couldn’t think or feel anything limitless without it. I curled up onto my side in rapid contraction and stuck my knuckles into my mouth to stifle a cry that didn’t erupt out of my throat so much as it drifted down from Moon’s room to overtake and instrumentalize me.

  10. Kinship

  I AWOKE DESPONDENT AS USUAL, faced with the formidable task of finding Moon somewhere in the world. But as the haze of sleep lifted, the task narrowed into the far more achievable one of finding Moon somewhere around the Sanctuary. For a few minutes, I was too disoriented to move out of bed.

  Suddenly unable to bear the idea of him roaming the house without me, I got up and dressed in a hurry—or perhaps he was still asleep. Buoyed by this thought, I bounded down the stairs with a feeling of pristine potential, an advantage measurable in seconds.

  But Moon wasn’t in the dining room. I did, however, finally catch a glimpse of Mister Suguk. He was a trim man with an aquiline profile and a pair of unusually large hands folded in his lap. He seemed to be keeping them at bay from the world, afraid they might accomplish more than he personally intended. His food was going cold. When Miss Lina tugged at his sleeve, he turned to her with slow recognition, like she was hailing from a misty distance.

  “Do you know where my younger brother is?” she asked.

  “You worry too much,” Mister Suguk said serenely. “I’m sure he’s closer than you think.”

  Farther down the table, the Caregiver was helping Mister Goun eat, but he kept pushing food back out of his mouth to ask for the time. I noticed this was dampening the mood of the normally unflappable woman. Still, she answered him without fail, and always down to the second.

  “How can I eat?” Miss Lina began to moan. “How can I possibly eat?”

  “I ask myself that, too,” the Caregiver said, nodding seriously. “Still, I would love for all of you to go on living. I encourage it very much. Not because it’s any fun. We know better than most how stunning the despair can be, perfect in its meaninglessness like the structure of an ice crystal. But we must see our miserable experiences through to the end.”

  I prowled the rest of the house in search of Moon. Strangely, I couldn’t find stairs that would lead up to the attic. Then I remembered the stone turret. I went outside, where I fell into powerful disorientation at the sight of the sun blazing psychotically over the lake, whose plasticine surface accelerated in all directions for kilometers—it was hard to believe that any of this had been happening while I’d been tucked away in the Sanctuary. I walked around the house until I found the turret, internalizing its position. But when I went back inside and tried to move in its direction, I kept ending up in the kitchen. The Sanctuary was manifestly against me: Cook, it said, forget love.

  In Miss Lina’s atelier, I found the cherry blossoms in rapid and systematic decay. Brown clumps plummeted all around me with an undignified squelch. The ground, heaped with these moist deaths, steamed in the sun. So ruthless was the deterioration that I felt as though the atelier wasn’t progressing through a season of change but moving in reverse, setting its dials back to zero. Moon, as it turned out, was not waiting for me at the tree.

  But then there were footsteps in the distance.

  I positioned myself with all the charm and elegance I could muster, wanting to leave Moon no doubt in his mind that he should pick me up and carry me away. But it was Miss Lina who found me. Before I could apologize, she took me into her arms and said everything I’d heard her say to Moon the previous day. And I responded with everything I’d heard Moon say. After all, it was easier for Miss Lina to believe I was her brother than it was for me to believe she was Moon. When she pulled away to examine my face, it seemed to be gratification, not incre【创建和谐家园】ty, that widened her eyes. I must have looked just as she remembered.

  * * *

  WHEREVER I WENT, I worried that Moon was now in the place I’d left behind. So I headed back to the dining room. There, I found Mister Suguk eating with newfound gusto. A young woman I’d never seen before had taken Miss Lina’s place at his side. I found the stranger’s outfit wholly illegible: a fast-fashion T-shirt evoking the pleasures of nightlife, khaki cargo pants, and black rubber safety shoes. The intense disorder of her look brought it all to nothing; I couldn’t see her as wearing anything in particular.

  The old man appeared to be admonishing the girl:

  “Stay here with me. With the further training of your already excellent mind, you will rise quickly to the top of your class. In you I see the seeds of an astonishing thinker, a blazing torch for those who have lost their way.”

  “There’s no hope for me, Teacher,” the girl said. “I’m mediocre just like everyone else. Whenever I’m faced with a decision, it’s inevitably between two lukewarm options. So I fall into bed from exhaustion and proceed to have no dreams.”

  “Your soul must rise above the masses.”

  “My soul has to be back at work tonight. My soul needs money. And a bigger apartment.”

  I sat opposite the pair, me【创建和谐家园】erized by the girl. Her 【创建和谐家园】all strong body, I felt, belonged to a sailor—arms that pulled at ropes, a stance that never lost its balance. Her black hair was gathered into a thick braid that snaked around the side of her neck and down to her stomach. Her skin had the translucence of an insect’s wings, but there was nothing innocent about its purity. Instead, it possessed the quiet heroi【创建和谐家园】 of having passed defiantly through life without protection, only to emerge unscathed. Amidst this opalescence hovered her dark eyes.

  “What do you do for work?” I asked, unable to help my curiosity.

  “I work at a seafood restaurant,” she said. “I’m usually way in the back, knifing open a dead skate with one hand and holding my nose with the other. I’ve been banned from the front of the house. Too many customers complained that I looked like I was about to throw up while I served their food.”

  “You were bad for business,” I said approvingly.

  “I’m just sensitive to the 【创建和谐家园】ell. I take a single whiff and know the skate stood no chance. I should get used to it, though. It’s what I’ll 【创建和谐家园】ell like soon enough.”

  “What do you mean?” I objected. “You’re still so young. Nothing has been decided yet.”

  “I’ve been in and out of a juvenile detention center for years,” she said with an amused 【创建和谐家园】ile. “The logical result of my contact with the world seems to be: me getting sent back to the center. Anyway, let’s see. I’ve been out for a few months now.”

  I was startled to find the Caregiver watching this young guest with naked pity. I tried to imagine what kind of crimes the girl might have committed—arson, perhaps. I sensed she had the necessary self-awareness, a certain lack of narcissi【创建和谐家园】, that would allow her to relinquish total authorship of her violence; she wouldn’t mind letting a fire spread out of her control.

  “I haven’t seen you before,” she said. “Whose kin might you be?”

  “No one’s. I’m here to see Moon.”

  “Moon,” she said, like she was jogging her memory. “Are you an old friend of his?”

  “Not exactly. We met for the first time yesterday. But I’ve wanted to meet him for a long time.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “You’re a fan,” she said flatly.

  “Not exactly …”

  “Is there anything you’re exact at being?” she said. “Watch out. You might hurt Moon’s feelings with that kind of evasion. I like to tell Moon straight to his face that I’m the opposite of his fan. But he shouldn’t take it personally. I’m incapable of putting anyone on a pedestal. I see the worst in people.”

  Whenever the girl blinked, her eyes ended up somewhere new on Mister Suguk’s body; I never caught them moving. The old man was gulping down a glass of water and palpably blooming with strength. When he drew a napkin over his drooping mouth, he was instantly transformed into an elegantly aged movie star.

  “You should’ve seen my father back in the day,” the girl said. “I’m not embarrassed to say that he was taken seriously as a sexual candidate wherever he went.”

  “So he isn’t your teacher,” I said.

  “He used to be. And a very good one. I think he always wanted to be my teacher more than he wanted to be my father. Well, his dream came true. He must’ve been onto something, because our relationship has never been better.”

  She laid a hand on the back of her father’s head.

  “Teacher,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Mister Goun’s head jerked up.

  “Where?” he called out from the end of the table. “Where are you going?”

  “We will travel the world,” Mister Suguk said, rising from his seat with energy.

  “I also want to travel the world,” Mister Goun said.

  “I’m sorry, my friend,” Mister Suguk said. “But you are too broken.”

  Mister Goun leaned his head back and shut his eyes.

  “I’m not broken,” he said. “I’m just very tired.”

  * * *

  WE FOUND MOON alone in Mister Suguk’s atelier. Dressed in a dark blue uniform for schoolboys, he was standing before a chalkboard, pulling down a map. I was surprised by how well he fit into the musty charm of the classroom, which was crowded with kinking rows of wooden desks. The girl swept past Moon without saying hello and seated herself in the last row, where she crossed her arms with a pert sigh, refusing to meet his eyes. I struggled to guess what he could have possibly done to exasperate her so. Mister Suguk, however, was pleased to see the boy.

  “Student Council President,” the old man said, “I trust you have all our affairs in order—the treasury, the attendance sheet, the list of prizes that my students will win someday.”