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I couldn’t hide my irritation. O, perfectly unbothered, began unlidding one takeout container after another.
“I’m aware you’re no closer to finding Moon,” she said. “But this was never going to be a search where you approach him in increments. True, thousands of kilometers may have been closed between you and him, but keep thinking with a measuring stick and you’ll reduce yourself to an asymptote. No, a hand must come sweeping out of the heavens. A tree laden with oranges must sprout in a chemical wasteland. You must be exactly where you need to be through a fission of bruising willpower and taut surrender. I’m trying to find new cracks for you. I won’t pull you back from the edge. I will let you fall. You’ll leave me for good. I’ve known it all along. I’m arming you with a vision that has nothing to do with me. I don’t need your gratitude, but until that day comes, can’t you at least let me help in the only way I can?”
We proceeded to eat on the couch in silence. At some point, I had the uneasy feeling that I was being watched. I looked up, but the door to O’s mother’s room was still shut. My gaze shifted left. Through the open door of O’s room, I could see a canvas lying on the floor.
“What is that?” I asked.
O stood up and walked to her room. She got onto her hands and knees, peering over the edge of the canvas as though it were a pond.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I’m painting you. Thank god I met you in the summer. The backs of your knees stay so 【创建和谐家园】ooth and white even as they travel all over the city with us. But upon closer inspection I’ve noticed a network of delicate wrinkles. The backs of your knees are scored with the history of your lovely movement. It makes me wonder: is perfection just the massive accumulation of 【创建和谐家园】all errors?”
I stood over O’s shoulder. The canvas was mostly blank. In the lower half, the back of my left knee was rendered in vivid detail. Had O not told me, I wouldn’t have known it was mine. I didn’t know the backs of my knees well enough. Meanwhile, the back of my right knee was rendered only as a whorl of black strokes. The size and placement of the knees suggested that the painting would eventually depict my entire body.
“I’m not done yet,” O said. “You’re still new to me.”
I was stunned by the mere existence of the painting, how O’s imagination could be cracked open and pulled apart like a cervix for the crowning of such a weirdly limbed perception. I could see, even in these early strokes upon the canvas, that the work would become an image of myself truer than any reflection in a mirror. The prospect of this image—of what it might reveal—suddenly frightened me. Indeed, O’s painting made me wish I could return to a time before my birth, back when I was still steeling myself for the limitations of the body to come. Then I could plan in advance all the ways in which I would dare to be. This was, of course, a pointless fantasy. I was already here, in the thick of this life, a parade of missed opportunities, a second-to-second condemnation of my mediocrity.
I got on one knee and bent over to examine the back of the other, but I couldn’t see the area in its entirety no matter how much I twisted at my waist. Newly intrigued by this elusive tract of skin, I used one of the wooden chopsticks I was still holding from dinner to trace its wrinkles. I was tracing with increasing pressure, hypnotized by the unusual sensation, when the skin suddenly broke. A gem of blood burst free. O, hearing my little gasp of pain, turned around and slapped my hand away from my leg.
“It’s just the back of my knee,” I said. “Don’t like it so much.”
“You can be a real idiot sometimes,” she said.
“It’s my knee. I don’t want it to count for anything. Don’t I get to decide that?”
O didn’t respond. She was busy dabbing the back of my knee with a wet tissue. So much closer was she to this part of my body than I was that the two of them appeared to be in collusion against me.
* * *
UNABLE TO STAY away for long, Y/N sees Moon in concert again. She’s just as overwhelmed as the first time. Her chest tightens with panic as she remembers that Moon will be going on tour with the other boys for the next four months, leaving her no choice but to follow him around the world. She starts to wonder how many more concerts she’ll have to attend before she achieves some semblance of satisfaction.
Satisfaction of what? she asks herself.
Dark blue light floods the stage. It’s time for Moon’s new solo ballad. He’s wearing a white blouse studded all over with genuine diamonds. They weigh down the fine cashmere, accentuating the childlike 【创建和谐家园】allness of his shoulders.
He begins to dance. In the middle of the song, he throws his hands into the air. Then, it transpires: the ineffable move she witnessed months ago in their apartment. Nothing about the move has changed, yet she almost fails to recognize it—perhaps it’s the stage, the audience, the altered circumstances. The move sends everyone into a frenzy of euphoria; even Y/N experiences a fresh wave of joy. She’s proud of him, pleased that the world can finally witness this moment of beauty. But she feels bereft as well. The move has been snatched from the secret cabinet of her joy and thrown onto the stage for all to see. She looks around in a daze. She’s perturbed to witness such sweeping agreement on what was once an intensely private experience.
Moon’s song hasn’t even ended when she turns around and walks out of the stadium. As she heads across the parking lot in the dark, she 【创建和谐家园】ashes a mosquito against her ear, irritated by the woeful soundtrack of its hysterical survival.
* * *
I COULDN’T IMAGINE a better death than falling over from walking too much. One afternoon, I began at the concrete platform by the river and walked northeast through Seongsu-dong until I reached a stretch of open market stalls, which carried me past a university, at which point I made a northwestward loop that took me past Children’s Grand Park and into Wangsimni, where my father had grown up.
I managed to find a modern high-rise for which, I suspected, his childhood home had been demolished. I tried to imagine my father on this plot of land, daydreaming seriously, but all I could see was the building falling out of the sky and crushing him.
I embarked on another long walk, this time to Daechi-dong, where my mother had grown up. As I wound between the residential complexes, I remembered a story. When my mother was ten, a thief had poisoned their dog in the yard so that he could conduct his burglary unobstructed. The next morning, the entire family awoke to the shouts of my uncle, who’d found the dog dead on its side. My other uncle ran out the door. My mother ran out the door. My grandparents ran out the door. That afternoon, they searched the house for what might have been stolen. But as they swept their hands across every table, every shelf, they found that they couldn’t tell the difference between a space where something had gone missing and a space where nothing had been to begin with.
Years later, my mother’s father, a scholar of folklore, now long dead, wrote about the incident for a literary journal. He wrote about how his son discovered the dog in the yard, how his other son ran out the door, how his wife ran out the door, how he ran out the door, how even their neighbors ran over. Not a single word about my mother. She, who had always thought of herself as most loved by him, read the essay once and never again. She had run out the door, fallen to her knees at the dog’s side, and embraced it with her entire body. She had done all of these things. Or had she not? What had gone missing, the movements of her body or the love of her father? Unable to bear the disappearance of the latter, she willed herself to believe that she had stayed in bed with a fever that morning, that she had never run out that door, that she had never embraced that dead dog.
8. Polygon Plaza
O TOOK ME TO THE far outskirts of Seoul. We were alone on the sidewalk, which had the breadth of a seaside promenade but was lined with one gray industrial building after another. There was a persistent clanging in the distance and the 【创建和谐家园】ell of burning rubber in the air. We turned a corner and came upon a street that I could’ve sworn was the one we’d just left behind. But then the glittering peak of a mysterious structure rose into view between the manufactories.
What unfurled into completion was a colossal building shaped like an Egyptian pyramid. It sat in the center of an immense field of grass surrounded by industry. The building’s entire facade was composed of mirrored glass reflecting the cloudy sky with such clarity that there seemed to be a perforation in the sky itself where the double doors of the entrance had been flung open. At its threshold stood a black-suited man, who was waving in our direction with impatience.
“Let’s go,” I said to O. “I don’t think we should be here.”
She grabbed my hand and pressed something into it.
“I knew you wouldn’t participate in the lottery, so I did,” she said. “Your pig-headedness means you’ll have to enter Polygon Plaza as me.”
I looked down. It was her national ID.
“Wait—”
“But now I know it had to happen this way,” O said. “To protect the purity of your faith. Luck has befallen me because it knew I had no interest in using it for my own good.”
Without giving me a chance to speak, she pushed me onto the grass, making me fall onto my hands and knees. I was hurt that O would handle me so, but then I realized, to my greater pain, that she was sending me away, that she wanted me to forget her in the name of my search for Moon. When I got to my feet, I saw that the man was waving more impatiently than ever. I was certain that if I took another step in his direction, I could never return to O. I swept around—she was already gone.
There was no path to the building. As soon as I began the long walk across the grass, the man’s hand dropped to his side. A cloud drifted past in the towering glass facade, making the building, for all its sharp contours, appear vaporous, like it might disappear at any moment. When I finally reached the man, I laid O’s ID on his outstretched hand. That was when I had my first proper look. In the picture, O had short hair tucked behind her ears, its ends curling up from under her lobes. Her real name was Oseol. The man scrutinized me, then waved me in.
The grass surrounding the building continued past the front door and sprawled into the farthest corners of the vast lobby. Sunlight filtered through the slanted glass walls and cast a spectral fog upon the indoor field. There was no other lighting, and the air was cool and fresh. So great was the size of the plaza that it took me several minutes to cross to the opposite side, where the nine other lottery winners were already gathered in tense silence before the doors of an elevator. Averse to meeting any more fans, I stood in the back beside a middle-aged man dressed for the office, arms crossed and face dark with haras【创建和谐家园】ent, as if he were surrounded by incompetent functionaries.
The elevator opened with a chime. Sun stepped out. Strangled noises rose from the group, and the office worker, to my disappointment, punched his own thigh in quiet victory. Sun was wearing black dress pants and a black polyester jacket filled with a thin layer of down. He bowed deeply, making the material rasp. I was startled to see gray streaks in his hair. He rose, paused, then rushed forward with a 【创建和谐家园】ile and began shaking our hands.
“I know this might come as a shock,” he said as he moved through the group. “But I thought it best to get our meeting out of the way, without any fanfare.”
He gave my hand a superficial squeeze with his face already turned to the office worker. When the man’s turn came, he would not let go of Sun’s hand.
“Please,” the boy said with extreme gentleness. “You’ll ruin it for the others.”
The office worker looked around at the rest of us with distaste. Then he let go. Sun remained standing at the man’s side in seeming assuagement and continued speaking:
“Welcome to Polygon Plaza. The boys and I are so pleased to have you here. I know—you’re probably wondering where the others are. Don’t worry, they’re in the building, tucked into their favorite corners, getting ready to meet you. But you will be alone with me for the first hour. It’s easier that way, for there is much to explain. Plus”—he 【创建和谐家园】iled knowingly—“you know what I’m like, don’t you?”
There was a beat of silence, then someone called out:
“You’re the boss!”
It was a chic elderly lady with an easy air about her. The group relaxed into laughter. Sun joined in, shaking his head in self-deprecation.
“But I’ve gotten better over the years, haven’t I?” he said. “Remember how merciless I could be with Jupiter? And he causes me no less trouble these days.”
“You really did have an awful temper back then,” the elderly lady said. “I always admired Mercury for trying to fight back. Moon, however, would fall into a catatonic state that resembled my late sister’s—”
Sun raised a hand, cutting her off. A fearful hush fell over the group.
“Let’s move on.” He swept his hand to the side. “Polygon Plaza has ten rooms, each of which occupies an entire level of the building. Here we are on the first floor, which, as you can see, has been overtaken by the outside world. The boys and I must never forget the world. We must feel it grabbing at our heels, trailing in after us, even as we’ve reached the seemingly safe shores of Polygon Plaza. Only with a fresh awareness of the world’s dangers can we stand on the other floors with the urgency required to create work of any significance.”
Sun pressed the button for the elevator, opening the doors.
“Or so we thought. That was why we never invited you here. We sought seclusion in our own 【创建和谐家园】all society so that our work would be bright and strange. We felt that we couldn’t be in the world at your side if we wanted to touch you at the deepest level of your souls, for we weren’t your friends, no, we were agents of upheaval. But everything has changed since you last saw us. Now we need you here. So please, step inside.”
The back wall of the elevator compartment sloped in conformity with the building’s pyramidal architecture. We had to pack ourselves close to the door, beside which was a single column of ten square buttons.
“No curves are to be found anywhere in the building,” Sun said. “Even the light bulbs are cubes. As the Music Professor likes to say: ‘Let the corners stab.’ ”
Without trying, I ended up standing next to Sun. On the other side of him hovered the office worker, who continued to survey the rest of us with gloomy superiority. He was like a father and a son at once, protecting Sun while also petulantly demanding his attention. None of this escaped the boy, who rested his hands on my and the office worker’s shoulders in a show of impartiality. So uninvested was his touch, lacking even in the tension of restraint, that I grew attuned to the slim void between his fingers and my shoulder. When he lifted his hand away to press for the fifth floor, what I experienced wasn’t freedom but a crushing density of air.
* * *
WE DISEMBARKED INTO a dark, musky library. Shelves of books wound through the room in a disorderly line, not unlike intestines, creating uneven amounts of space between the shelves. A 【创建和谐家园】all golden lamp was affixed to the head of each shelf, illuminating its contents, which were organized not by author or title, but rather, we were told, by the first word of the text.
The sole exception was the section devoted to the dozens of volumes of social critique authored by the Music Professor. Sun led us to the shelf, which was built into the center of one of the sloping walls. The Music Professor knew nothing about music other than its capacity to move her deeply, and she intended to keep it that way. But she was an expert on the Himalayas and the Galapagos, she knew how to speak Russian and Turkmen, and she knew how to break bread with the very poor as well as the lofty elite, having led, until founding the company at the age of forty, a richly nomadic life, the details of which remained obscure to the public. She had given herself the title of Music Professor with irony, Sun said, for nothing revolted her more than the modern university. She considered it a clinic of castration for minds as well as the sexual organs; nowhere did you find dumber, unsexier people. Whenever the boys sought her advice, she directed them to a book that bore no relevance to their problem. Whenever they asked her a question, she responded with at least ten questions in turn.
“Have you been reading as if your life depends on it?” she liked to ask the boys. “Have you been reading as if every single sentence could be true? So that as soon as you build an affinity for the ideas of one book, another book comes along with ideas of its own, and as soon as you think it’s one versus the other, dozens of other books appear, parts of some aligning with parts of others, sowing confusion in your soul? Have you been reading until you feel sick on everything you know?”
In the corner of the library was an acne-ridden young man sitting with his feet propped up on a baize-surfaced desk. We gathered around him, but he made no move of acknowledgment, too immersed as he was in a massive tome spread across his thighs. He had just paused on an image in which a breast and an eyeball were inexplicably the same size. Sun laid a hand on the back of the young man’s chair and introduced him as the librarian. Because the Music Professor wanted the boys to cultivate diverse intellects, rare was the item that failed to make the shelves. There was just one criterion for rejection: any direct reference to the boys. Under the librarian’s strict surveillance, not a single biography, reportage, or scholarly work about the boys could penetrate the walls of Polygon Plaza. The Music Professor insisted that the boys be masters of their own identities. No one in the company, not even the makeup artists, was permitted to watch a boy gaze at his own reflection in the mirror. He possessed the inviolable right to contemplate his own image in private, insulated from how others conceived of his relationship with himself.
The boys would remain the Music Professor’s sole project until she retired. She released—without any questions asked—whatever they made. She never told them what to do. Freed from the obligations of school, family, and money, the boys had that which all artists dreamed of: time, endless time. Plus: musical instruments from all over the world; the country’s largest collection of records; various rooms in which to practice; and a recording studio featuring hundreds of buttons, dials, and switches for the infinite manipulation of sound. All of these resources could be found on the other levels of the building.
Consider how few genuine incursions creativity made into the average life, the Music Professor often said. What would happen if creation were a job to do? Culture amounted to a collection of agreed-upon values that made it possible for large groups of people to live beside each other in relative peace. What would happen if a teenage boy shared a culture not with billions of strangers but with just a few other boys? What would happen if context, especially the crass pressure of survival, were stripped away? What would happen if physical security, creative fulfillment, and even wild success were guaranteed? How might a boy construct his humanity outside of these aims?
But nowhere on the planet was there room for this kind of experimentation. Too urgent was the basic task of survival for the poor. Too stultified were the well-off by shame and hypocrisy, by their spineless parroting of the propaganda they confused for higher learning. This was where the Music Professor made her intervention. Polygon Plaza cordoned off space for a certain kind of experience that was becoming ever rarer in the world. She liked to compare Polygon Plaza to a monastery: a place where the dissolution of the self produced moments of astonishing self-expression.
In advanced societies all over the world, people were running around in circles and indulging their 【创建和谐家园】all adorable freedoms, like wearing this or that outfit or sleeping with this or that person. They confused their navigation through the stunning variety of meaningless choices as an expression of their individuality. True individuality, however, was indistinguishable from the evacuation of the self in service of a higher purpose, she claimed. At first glance, this self-annihilating devotion might seem to produce a peculiar blandness of character. But look deeper, she urged. The true individual abstracted his personal desires so as to perform bold acts of creation or faith. He took the dense yet limited substance of his lived experience and charged it—through sacrifice, through discipline—with breathless latitude. His work was thus capable of setting the souls of others on fire.
So the problem with today’s cultural excretions, according to the Music Professor, wasn’t the erosion of an artist’s idiosyncrasy but the insufficiency of that erosion. This was not limited to the arts. The spiritual vacuity of our consumption and conversation, the daily torture of justifying our ethical fraudulence, the ever intensifying yearning for love in a world that systematically handicapped our very capacity for it—amidst this desolation, how could one not think that the solution was to retreat behind the walls of the self and become utterly singular? This was why people clung to markers of identity as if they were differentiating, when the mere fact that there already existed a name for this difference meant it wasn’t differentiating enough. No, the perverse cunning of the human spirit manifested itself in submission to the erosion of all categories, a descent into namelessness, homelessness, nothingness. Only then did one have a chance at achieving universality.
* * *
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.”