Chapter Text
It wasn’t Sheriff Choi’s idea to let Yeonjun stand next to him during the press conference.
At five thirty, six, and eleven, Yeonjun’s raw, tear-streaked face played on every station, exposed to the world. It was his face that landed on the morning paper, dissected with sidebars. Was he sorry? Grieving? Traumatized?
They didn’t really care. It was just something else to talk about. A little sidebar to the main story, which was that the Primitive Boy was dead. In his gravelly Sheriff Choi told the world that Choi Soobin was dead.
There were witnesses. Choi Yeonjun, the son who brought the Primitive Boy out of the forest in the first place. And three very shocked fishermen, whose truck he stopped in the middle of the road.
Panicked, they said. Crying and hysterical, translated the newspapers.
But they all believed, the Parks Department and the Sheriff’s Department, the Police, and just about anybody else with a badge and a vested interest. They believed Yeonjun when he said he found Soobin burning up with fever. They believed him when he said he did his best to drag Soobin out of the woods.
They put a blanket around his shoulders and carried him away in an ambulance, in the middle of the nastiest spring thunderstorm any of them could remember. Four days passed before it was safe to send people into the depths of the national forest again. Hikers, campers (bloggers, reporters) were advised to note the GPS coordinates if they found remains—under no circumstances should they attempt to remove the Primitive Boy from his grave.
It was a warning made on account of protocol. Nobody expected to find a body—four days! Four days in the rain and the elements and the wild. No one said it, but everyone believed it: what remained of the Primitive Boy was probably bubbling in a coyote’s belly and feeding the beetles.
And it was always the Primitive Boy.
His birth name was barely remembered. Even when magazines dug up the very strange history of Choi Bohee, interviewed old friends and colleagues, they still called her son the Primitive Boy. That was the story. They wouldn’t let go.
That’s what made it easy for Soobin to make his way into the mountains. On his own, he decided to cut his hair. When he passed through a regular hiking trail, he traded a couple of furs for a down coat and some boots. They fit all right. What mattered was they weren’t primitive.
Neither was he. He had maps and a compass, and a paygo cell phone. And as he stepped into his first dark night in the mountains, he looked up. The stars shifted with the seasons, but they never changed. When he gazed at Orion, Yeonjun gazed at him, too. That hunter, wearing the skins of an animal, standing against the elements, stretched between them.
It was the light that blinked, the one that streaked across the horizon, that would connect them. Soobin pressed the number one on his cell phone and sent a message not to the stars, but to the satellite.
The satellite caught it and tossed it back, over trees and mountains, valleys and rivers. Over miles and miles, in the blink of an eye. Soobin waited, breath caught in his throat, listening to the distance. The silence went on, but not endlessly. Barely a moment passed.
Yeonjun answered. He would find Soobin. He just had to look up.