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Human touch was something more like a memory of a dream. Hazy washed out green-cast film pictures of three men when they were boys on a beach, trousers rolled up to their thighs, still wet and salty besides. It looked like a place you could be in if you just closed your eyes a little longer.
Heeseung's hand shook as he looked down into the picture because it always did. Never stopped since the first tremor and never would. As best as he could he was trying to dive into the sea, to stop time and live forever dead with two boys' hands in each of his.
A long time ago before he got a funeral of his own Jay said that it was hard to look at the pictures and not think of the funerals first. And Heeseung understood that because sometimes that was how it was. Sometimes he looked at the one of them kissing, all three in Halloween drag, (and they had to hand that roll of film and a lot of other rolls of film to Riki to develop because they couldn't trust a stranger with that kind of thing), and the only thing he could think of was the stale cold of the funeral home and all the familiar faces from all the other funerals (and all the missing faces, too) and the scratch of his rented suit and the tears and the headache they caused. The headache he still wore as a tightening crown around his head when he stepped up to speak, king-winner of the race to keep living. A snot-dotted eulogy typewritten on two pieces of plain paper that he dropped to the floor with the first tremor he ever got. He couldn't get through that eulogy because Sunoo wasn't there to hold him through it like with the last one he gave. Because when he smiled weakly at the casket the body inside didn't smile back at him.
It had been too long since then for him to feel those days like they were yesterday. His old bones, his body moved different now. So when he looked at the pictures mostly the first thing he thought of was their touch. Jungwon's chapped lips and Sunoo's supple ones and the way their bodies looked pressed against each other and him. More innocent: the sound of their laughter eaten up by the waves, the sweat of their palms as they held hands and jumped into the swells, their scraped knees pressed together as they hid from their mothers behind a limpet-crusted rock and smoked their first cigarette together, snatched from Heeseung's brother's pocket. The nicotine high and the swooping rush of knowing nothing at all but that you loved the boys next to you and you wished you could taste their spit on the filter.
Under the beach, time tossed all out of order, were those bodies Heeseung always thought of. Not the ones bone-thin at the end of it, hard like the wooden arm of the chair Heeseung was sitting in, but those there at the beginning. After the beach but before the funerals. Smooth and soft, a give to them when held. Here were three bare bodies on a bed, Sunoo between Heeseung and Jungwon, all a little blurry because Jake (who had been sleeping on their couch at the time) had never been very good at holding a camera steady. They had been on the younger edge of their mid-twenties and the touch of another man had been the most wonderful touch in the world. They had all three of them been beautiful.
Things felt different under Heeseung's old nerve-damaged hands than they used to. No matter how many times he dreamed up the fading remembered slide of skin-on-skin his wrinkled palms would never really know that touch. Would never really know those shapes, those that once were and those that never got to exist. Those that were trapped in this shoebox gallery. Photo gloss an old man's lover, a flattened-out ghost.
Sunoo would have deep smile lines, he'd decided a long time ago. Crow's feet and salt-pepper hair and somehow he'd have managed to fend off the liver spots mottling Heeseung's hands and the patch of scalp on the crown of his skull where his hair got a lot thinner. Jungwon – he would have a deep furrow between his brows and tree-rings on his forehead and his lips would've thinned to near-nothing, perpetually pursed. That air of fond disappointment he got when Sunoo and Sunghoon bothered each other too much or Heeseung got too foolish would never fade, etched into his face by the love of age. The only love Heeseung couldn't give to him.
The green cast on the next picture turned the hospital teal. Out in the lobby, Jungwon in a wheelchair and Sunoo resting his arms on the push-handles, stacking his head above Jungwon's. Two young smiling lineless faces looking not into the lens but at the person behind it.