Chapter Text
Sometimes he thinks Gihun can almost see him. That he can feel him there. Less than a meter and a half above him, he can almost smell the grease in his dark unwashed hair, the faint near invisible wisps of grey, the pale scattering of dandruff flakes sticking to Gihun’s scalp —he hasn’t showered in the past four days —hell, he hasn’t even washed his face yet —Inho can tell from patches of redness around his nose, the flakes of dry skin sticking to his cheeks whenever he threw his head back, gasping.
Inho gasps, matching him breath for breath, kneeling hunched in the dark. Fuck. He’s almost there.
Sometimes Gihun went for over a week without showering. Maybe most people wouldn’t understand it, but Inho actually preferred when Gihun went unwashed for a while —his hair got so beautiful in the way that the unraveled curls became far more shiny and pronounced —and he could smell him so much better that way. Sweet. That was the strongest smell of them all, the sweetness.
Inho could press his nose to the thinnest part of the drywall or even to the small square vent unevenly caked in plaster bits —and Gihun’s natural unwashed scent would waft up through the eleven thin, dust-fluffed slats and make Inho go near insane, heart rate going into overtime as his underarms dampened, as did the corners of his mouth, hand instinctively reaching beneath his pants. He could get off to his smell alone.
In the later days, Inho would go into the master bedroom and dig down in the hamper for the oldest, cakiest pair of boxers Gihun had thrown in, practically stuck fast to the white plasticky bottom. Crusted all over down the middle in yellowish white arias of old urine and sweat on the ribbed grey fabric, flakes breaking off along his fingers as he stuffed it down the front of his pants, feeling his dick twitch on instinct when it brushed the skin of his inner thighs. He’d get harder with each step, stiffening more and more as he descended the stairs until crossing the bare, cement floor in the garage became nearly unbearable, but then he’d be in the dark, below ground.
Lying on his back, head pressed to the unmade wall, he pulls the boxers out of his pants. Pulse hammering in his throat. The center of his palms would thrum impatiently against the twisted fabric. Then Inho would push it down hard against his face and take one long, achingly slow inhale. Then another. And another. He’d have to fight from gagging at first. The stench was so strong the inside of his throat would burn, his eyes would water. Once he got used to it, he’d start to lick into it. Long, deliberate strokes, sucking in the taste. Swallowing it down. He would moan, his other hand already moving down to touch himself. Soon he’d have a portion of the boxers sucked into his mouth. Soaking, sopping wet, squished in his saliva, smeared caked bits in his teeth. By then he’d be fully hard again if he’d ever lost his erection earlier and oozing precum down his fingers, wetter than any girl he’s ever been with. His jeans would be halfway down his thighs. Bits of the dirt floor stuck to his bare ass, in the tight, tough spaces that were missed by the giant plastic trash bags he’d laid out weeks earlier each time he shifted and the plastic stuck and moved with his skin.
He would come with a sudden, shuddering violence that left him trembling and near-blind for several minutes. Trying to catch his breath.
Not for long. He has to stay active. Move off into one of the many makeshift camps he’s set around the house —a more secluded area of the garage, the garden shed, back of the storage closet, the cupboards, the attic. Anywhere that was generally disused, poorly maintained. The attic was especially nice. Plenty of empty boxes. Spare blankets, clothes. Warm. He often slept there nowadays. Right next to the vent.
It was way better than just watching him from his screen.
Inho found Gihun by mistake. He was surfing an illegal cam site where hundreds of 24-hr live feeds of anonymous private homes played on, row upon row, and stumbled upon Gihun there. Back then, he hadn’t known his name. All he saw was him —just the thumbnail at first —a slim, darkish figure lounging against the counter of a nondescript kitchen. He might’ve even clicked it by mistake. But it took him to a larger version of the video and there he was. Leaning with his pale grey jeans crumpled at the knees, viciously stroking himself.
This much closer, Inho saw that he was actually fairly attractive —if a bit gaunt-looking —a handsome squarish jaw with prominent cheekbones, partially shrouded in an unruly mane of dark curly hair. His build was more on the slender side, but he had nice square shoulders and his lightly tanned arms were densely muscled despite appearing fairly thin. Inho found that the more he watched him, the sexier he became. He had a gorgeously thick cock to boot, the colour of ripe plums. It almost looked too big to fit between his thighs —except his thighs were fairly muscled too, tight and athletic, and Inho couldn’t help but imagine how great it must feel to be squeezed between those thighs whether it was by the waist or the face and he would gladly let his own head get squeezed between them just to have a taste of his cock.
How he craved him, how he wanted to push his face into every crevice of his skin, inhale him, consume him. He was everything to him. He became his world.
He stopped going to class.
His parents were overseas. He lived alone.
He could not stop watching him. He watched him everyday. He stopped doing anything else. He forgot to eat. To drink. To sleep. More than once he had an accident on his computer chair. He had to throw it away, buy a new one. He started bringing his laptop with him to the toilet. The plastic-metal surface soon burned his bare thighs. He’d prop his legs up against the wall and balance it along his shins as he pulled raggedly at himself, aiming his cock at the screen at the last possible moment —it was easier to clean that than the keyboard. He’d come before he flushed. Wipe himself with a strip of toilet paper and ball it up, drop it between his legs. Sometimes he forgot to wipe and only realized when he stood up, felt that unmistakable itch between his ass and then he had to strip his shorts back down and squat. His laptop would still be balanced precariously on the edge of the counter, still tuned into the 24-hr live feed.
Finding him was easy enough.
Despite him having nearly no social media —his Instagram was privated, his Kakao unavailable —a single screenshot of him masturbating on Inho’s laptop allowed Google Photos to locate his house. Google gave Inho his street address, the number of his unit and even the exact coordinates down to the last three decimal places. He could find him from a satellite in space. Inho took the bus on a weekend. It took less than an hour even with higher than usual traffic. It had been a holiday. He had to stand the whole way, that’s how crowded it had been. It didn’t matter. He stepped off the platform in the light rain and looked up. There it was. Gihun’s house. The same windows, the blinds half-drawn. Inside the television was playing. He was sleeping on the couch. Inho held his breath, the familiar nervous ache building in his palms. He was really here. Gihun, his sweet, unknowing angel Gihun. His love, his life. He was breathing his air. He was standing on his lawn.
Inho sat down on the grass. White clapboard. Grey-blue trim. Brass handle. Five windows, three on the second floor. He would take no pictures. That was childish, amateur. Slovenly. He was twenty-four. He had standards. At most he would make a sketch of it in his notebook, make multiple sketches. Make notes alongside the sketches. He wouldn’t need pictures. He would be coming here often. He would find a way inside.
A week later, he did.
It wasn’t even from going around the house —he’d found it while watching Gihun on his laptop, noticing a faint creaking slapping noise in the background. A screen door. It sounded heavier than a typical screen door —he recognized the thud of wood scraping the floor. Thwack, thwack, thwack. His side door was open. Inho watched him for a few more days after that. He was right. Again, that noise. That same creaking slapping, the soft thud of wood. Always knocking back and forth.
The next day, Inho went back. He went to the side of the house and tried the door. It was open.
Inho stepped inside and almost immediately sank to the floor. It was too much. Too much all at once. All the stagnant, lived-in smells overwhelmed him —the dusty curtains, the coat rack, the woollen sofa and rug in the den, the slightly tangy leftovers in the kitchen —he had to step out and lean against the wall. It was bright that day, disorienting. Inho squeezed his eyes closed. He’d already broken out into a light sweat down his neck. His left pinky had gone numb. It’s the first time he’s been in someone else’s house. Alone. Fuck. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. He should stop. Go home. He should go home right now while he still could, while he still hadn’t—
He went back inside.
In those early days, Inho really wondered what the hell he was doing. He hid behind the living room curtains. They were never open and reached the floor. Almost rug-like. Seemed to be thick and opaque enough so that his silhouette would not show through, but it wasn’t as though he could just walk out and check. He had to have some faith in it. Which wasn’t too hard, to be fair. Gihun went right on whacking off while Inho hid in there trying his best not to get a hard-on, less that it would be seen against the heavy curtain and more that it made him squirm, his skin squeaking against the glass. He couldn’t have chosen a less ideal spot. He couldn’t even really see him, stuck in there. He only heard him. It was worse than his laptop, but also somehow better. He was closer, he was still closer. It was different being in the same room. Almost the same room. He’d hear parts of Gihun’s breathing he’d never heard before. The hoarse, shakier ends of it that almost sounded like he was sobbing.
He hadn’t planned on staying. In the beginning he was only a shade. A shadow.
It’s easier to be a shadow. You condition yourself to anticipate their movements, their myriad micro-responses to external stimuli —the flicker of a shifted iris, a slight narrowing of the nostrils, a strain in the cheek, a dimple, a near untraceable dent in the corner of the lips. An almost imperceptible tremble in the jaw. An alertness. That’s all it was. Most people generalize it to fear or anxiety or even arousal, but a lot of the times it was far more basic than that. It happens so fast, the body doesn’t even register it as an emotion at first. The body is still investigating. But then the body is always investigating. Inho has been this way since the beginning, even before he had really known it yet.
Inho likes to think he knows Gihun better than anyone.
Photos are useless. Gihun keeps most of his tucked away in the narrow lower compartment of his dresser, most of the frames stacked against each other, the photo albums in a second stack all caked in dust. There is so much dust that when Inho peeled one album free from the top, the matted greyish fluff fell into his lap in patches. Most of the pages are empty.
In the back of one of the albums, there is a photograph that has been so severely folded and banged up that Inho hadn’t known what it was at first. Surprisingly, it is still intact. As Inho pulled it out from the plastic sleeve, bits of printed pigment and white specks stuck to his hand. The photo almost came apart in his hands. It had the feeling of paper that hadn’t fully dried from the rain. It was almost silken.
Hundreds of frayed white folding marks obscured the image, scarring it to the point of near non-recognition. Whole entire portions have been stripped out. The top half seemed to be overrun with colour —yellows, pinks, blues, violets, fuschias —Inho almost thought it was a printing aberration until he singled out something that must have once been a face in the center of the torn-out darkness. Only a portion of the cheek remained, a fine row of teeth from her smile. She had no eyes.
It was a funeral photo.
She barely looked five.
He slid the photo back into the sleeve. Whispered a quick prayer over her, his hand on the plastic. She wasn’t his to take.
There are only two photographs on display in the bedroom. Inho doesn’t take either.
There was a day when Inho tried on each and every single article of clothing Gihun owned. He laid them out one by one on the bed and when he ran out of space, he began laying them out on the carpet. There were forty seven in total.
Inho has a favourite shirt.
It’s the one that Gihun wears the most —so it is also Gihun’s favourite. In fact, the fact that Gihun wears it the most and makes it smell the most like him may be the reason it is Inho’s favourite and so they converge and become each other. There are many reasons why it could be his favourite. The material is soft, smooth and almost silk-like on the skin, slightly worn around the elbows, an unintrusive silvery blue that favoured both the office and going out. The fourth button is missing, however it appeared that Gihun tucked the rest below into his pants, so it didn’t matter. There is a pocket on the top left side. His initials are embroidered there in white thread. The tag in the back has been removed. Harder to locate the brand. It must be hand-washed in cold water and hung rather than folded, it is 100% polyester. Most days, Inho doesn’t dare wear it. Gihun wears it three, sometimes even four times a week and so it can only be accessed while he showers after work or while he’s having dinner downstairs, both of which do not give Inho enough time to masturbate with it and then clean himself up, return the shirt to its former state and hurry back down to the crawlspace.
He waits for the weekend. It’s better that way. Gihun has been wearing it all week, sweating in it and dropping flecks of spit and dandruff down the front, touching it with his hands, leaving strands of hair in the back. Inho has so much to drink in. He doesn’t even head downstairs, he strips himself naked right along the carpet. Gets down on his knees, laying the shirt open with the sleeves out like a makeshift cross, pressing his face right in. Inhaling. He doesn’t let himself lick it, leave any visible, wet marks on it at all. He’ll run his lips down the soft, thin material, pressing soundless and soft, but desperate kisses into it as he wills himself not to moan. He’ll press his groin harder into the carpet to muffle the sound of his fapping even if it’s harder on his wrist and keep going until he spurts. If he finds any bits of remaining dandruff or strands of hair inside the shirt, he’ll push them all into one corner and stuff them into his mouth and eat them. His tongue fights it, as does the roof of his mouth, he swallows over and over until he stops trying to throw up. He needs it. It is necessary. It is necessary for the transformation. All the while, Gihun is downstairs asleep.
A pile of unopened mail on the counter. That’s how Inho found it. Somewhere towards the end of the fourth day. Now he had a name to the face. Seong Gihun. Three syllables. The hushed start, then the glottal stop, the final sound barely an exhale. His whole name was just an exhale. Inho found himself repeating it to himself throughout the day, trying out the sounds in various self-induced incorrect rhythms and variations of intonation as though he were fabricating a children’s song without the words yet and using the three syllables as placeholders. More than once, he made himself laugh. Seong Gihun. Gihun-ah. Gihun-ssi. Seong ahjussi. Yeobo. That one made the back of his neck and ears prickle with heat, his chest tight. He would never be able to use that one.
Yeobo, you’re already awake? Inho would laugh to himself, standing in the kitchen, placing a few more pieces of marinated beef into the slow cooker alongside the soft cubed tofu, seaweed, eggs and kimchi. Homemade kimchi, he’d make it himself, just as he saw online, two sinks full of Napa cabbage, fish sauce and seasonings. He’d wait until Gihun had stepped over to him, leaning over and then digging his unevenly stubbled chin into his shoulder, feeling the tiny pricks of hair through his t-shirt. His breath would be warm, and mildly foul.
I’m making some of this for my lunch —you want some? When are you leaving? Gihun would yawn and hum slowly to himself, trying to flatten the hair sticking up in the back of his head. What time is it? Inho would glance at the clock on the microwave. It’s almost ten-thirty. Gihun’s eyes would shoot open, blinking rapidly and he’d almost mutter a string of curse words before the other would clutch his waist, squeezing it gently through his shirt. Sorry, yeobo. I was playing with you. It’s the weekend. He’d feel Gihun relax under his palm, then grin as a hand slid up his own thigh and squeezed his ass, Gihun’s hip pushing into his back. Oh, perfect. It’s the weekend.
Inho started watching him from the gap in the cupboards. He couldn’t quite smell him. Couldn’t see much of him either, still —and much of what he saw was lost to the near blinding light that streamed through the gaps in his silhouette from the sliding doors leading to the backyard. He saw his thighs most clearly, the portion of them left exposed where his pants were pulled down, the fine soft hairs that looked almost grey in the light, the few sparse darker hairs that grew closer to his groin which remained largely unshaven, watching Gihun’s fist that went back and forth towards the long purplish head of his cock, teasing out its fluids. Loud and wet, much of it dropped off down his legs, spattering around his feet. Inho strained his face closer to the gap, wishing he’d get some on his mouth, his cheek, anything. Nearly giving himself a heart attack when his head knocked into the doors, graciously saved by the slam of Gihun’s leg knocking back into the opposite cupboard of the kitchen island, a low, strained growl leaving his mouth as he came.
When he could hear the shower running upstairs, Inho would slip out, hands and knees on the white tile. Sometimes he’d find some. Some of it left. He’d drag his finger through it and then stare at the near invisible translucent smear under the cold kitchen light as though he was discovering the liquid for the first time. He tasted more dust and grit than the actual thing itself. Was it salty or sour, he couldn’t tell. More often than not, Inho would sit up on his knees and just press his face into the part of the counter that Gihun had pressed his bare ass against moments before. He’d inhale hard and sometimes he’d smell something and sometimes he wouldn’t. He’d pull his face farther up and close his mouth over that portion of the counter, start to bite down on it. Saliva would flood his mouth and start to slide down his chin. His arms would be pulled over straight against the counter, hands clasped. His teeth would start to ache. His eyes were closed. There were worse things to pray to. At least he could say it was real. At least it had a face.
In those moments Inho felt as though he was in the presence of something transcendent. The counter was getting warm under his tongue, his neck was wet with saliva and upstairs the shower was still running. What was that saying. So much water so close to home. No matter. He couldn’t even move if he wanted to.
Later that day, the cupboards swung open from the outside. The tap was running. Light fell in and then blocked itself out by a narrow crouching silhouette, the knees cracking. Inho scrunched back further into the packages of dried beans and mushrooms as a hand reached in, haphazardly trying to flatten himself against the back panel of slightly sticky warped wood while still keeping the bulk of his body curled tight in the unnaturally enormous ceramic soup dish he’d dozed off in. The hand reached deeper, suddenly gripping the edge of the dish. It tugged. Inho smushed his fist over his mouth, eyes squeezed closed. Fuck. Blood pounded in his ears, his face went hot and all of his breath had gone compressed into his throat. He couldn’t do this. He had to get out. The hand tugged again. Harder. In a panic, Inho grabbed the nearest thing to him —an open pack of bundled vermicelli —and thrust the packaging towards him, the edge of it scraping his fingers. The hand pushed it away. It reached even deeper, narrowly missing Inho’s thigh and felt around, flipping through dried beans, torn ribbons of tofu curd, red sugar, split lentils, black fungus, mixed barley and three different packs of glutinous rice powder. It went further to the right, lifting and the dropping various aluminum baking dishes until Inho reached back and handed him a medium-sized pot without looking, knocking the handle into his fingers. The hand grabbed the lid, then felt around, suddenly touching Inho’s face. Inho froze. The hand paused. It squeezed his cheek, then let go.
Inho felt himself go limp as the hand finally took the pot by the handle and banged the cupboards shut.
When he regained the strength to lift his arm, he felt down the front of his pants.
He’d remember it. He’d remember it forever. He stared up into the dark, tracing the edges of his fingernails loosely over it, already feeling himself harden from the thought of his hand again.
When Gihun was gone in the morning, Inho spent the whole of the day looking for him. What he left behind. Strands of hair, bits of shaved stubble. Dandruff on his pillow. Nail clippings in the sink. Socks he only wore indoors. He could spend the whole day on his hands and knees. Even as the skin was rubbed raw through his jeans and he had to take breaks just sitting on the floor, stretching his legs. Palms soothing his knees. He felt closer to them that way. The things. He pulled out a Ziploc from the half-torn open box in one of the kitchen drawers and stored them all inside. These pieces of him. His own personal trail mix of weary human evidence. Inho shook the bag around, holding it up against the light, wondering how he should store it. Should he find a way to grind everything up into a fine dust, so then he could sprinkle a bit into his tap water each day, and consume it as one would consume coffee or tea or even electrolytes? Should he savour it, only eat one piece per day —a single flake of dandruff, a single nail clipping, a single gleaming hair? It was probably better for his health that way, anyways. To have his body get used to it slowly —slowly accustom itself to being a passenger in Gihun’s life, his body a mere reservoir to contain it all. Not just a shadow. He would become something more. Something greater.
Inho picked out a single piece of dandruff and put it on his tongue, lying back down on the carpet of Gihun’s bedroom. It was somewhat salty, with the slight rust of blood. Almost sweet. Tangy. He stared at the ceiling fan.
He would take no metaphors. No wine as blood, no bread as flesh. Skin he’d find, dead skin —the unwanted and rubbed off, the done away with. Blood would cling to it, that was easy enough. He would make do with these —these tiny seemingly insignificant shreds until he could take more.
That evening when Inho went back into the cupboard, he fell asleep. He woke up in the middle of the night and realized he was still there. His back hurt as did his neck and the rest of his body that was pressed hard against the aluminum sheet-lined floor, the part of the steel pot that his cheek had stayed against was still warm. He’d discovered he’d stayed in the fetal position for at least three hours, after checking his phone. His tongue had gone all cottony and sour, he searched his back pocket for his Ziploc and pushed a few more pieces of dandruff into his mouth. Their salt soothed him, weak, flaring rings of violet, blue and white played behind his eyes. The aluminum was stuck to his skin and shrieked whenever he so much as shifted his other cheek. He stared out the gap until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore.
After that, he just stopped going home.
Two days later, he tried the shower. It wasn’t great. Several patches of black mould fouled the ceiling. There was more mould along the edges of the curtain inside the tub, a large portion of the fabric was stained a weird orangish brown. It took a solid minute for the hot water to come down and the spray was somewhat weak, but it got the job done. Plus he got to try the shampoo Gihun used.
The water had reached past his ankles when he shut it off.
Inho got down on his knees in the tub, fully submerging his cock, feeling bits of greyish foam clinging to his thighs and the parts of his ass that were above water. Water lapped at his hole, which seemed to have relaxed from the surrounding warmth. He put his hands underwater to displace some of the weight on his knees and slowly spread his thighs further to get more comfortable. Something was blocked over there. It wasn’t unusual. His mother had hair that reached down to her waist and every few months, the same thing would happen to theirs. He reached one hand forward and slowly hooked one finger into the drain.
It was all a clump. A wet clump of tight, grimy strands as thick as a wire sponge clogged it. Inho tugged. It wouldn’t budge. He tugged harder. And harder. Nothing. Harder. Some strands broke. Bits of longish twisted hair stuck to his flushed fingers. He tugged some more. Started picking around the sharp little gaps in the drain to loosen the hair at multiple points of tension, wet whitish grey grit building under his nails. He kept tugging. Soon it felt like a few of his fingertips had gone numb. He almost ripped a nail.
It came loose in three long, disjointed tufts. All at once a low sucking noise came from beneath him and Inho grabbed the beige rubber stopper on the ledge and pushed it down to prevent any more water from leaving. The noise stopped. He grabbed the three floating clumps of hair and began to twist them all together.
It was too large.
He pulled out two thirds of it and set it on the ledge. Now it was just right. He twisted the bit of hair he had left and formed a small, tight black stick about three inches long. The water was still warm. Good. He stared down at his shaft which had already started to thicken up while he’d been twisting the hair.
It shouldn’t be too hard. The slit in his glans was about a few millimetres wide. Inho sucked in a breath. He had no idea how it would feel. He’d never done this before even with a normal metal stick. He worried he might come too fast. Or not come at all.
What if he cut himself by accident? In there? How would he even begin to explain it to a doctor, much less his parents? They would institutionalize him. He’d never go outside again.
The toilet was less than an arm’s length away.
He grabbed himself by the base and pressed the tips of the twisted hairs in.
Oh, fuck. Fuck. That felt weird. Inho winced, eyes squeezed closed, his knees trying to scramble themselves away in the slippery, water-filled tub. It was barely a centimetre in. He felt it scratching down his insides in the worst way as he slowly pressed the coarse, itchy hairs in deeper, his hips twitching all over like his entire lower body was undergoing a seizure. Holy fuck. It itched so much. So much. It felt like he’d stuck a tiny Velcro strap inside himself, the rough sided part. Or a million crushed insects. Every fibre of his being was begging himself to stop. He pushed it in deeper. Nearly screamed. He fought it with all his might, biting down his tight, pained groans. Fucking shit. It felt so bad. So bad, so fucking bad, he’d never do this again.
And then he started pulling the hair out.
Something happened then. Inho moaned. The sensation of it, the slow, scraping escape of the tight, twisted hairs brought such sweet, aching relief to the inside of his cock, he started to feel himself harden again. He pulled until nearly all of it was out. Then he pressed it back in. Slowly. This time he was a bit more used to it. The itching came back again, the almost manic feeling of the tangled wiry hair scraping down until he could push it down no further. He paused, just staring at himself. It was a wild image to behold. His reddened, erect cockhead widened at the slit by several tight dark strands of filthy drain-clogged hairs —bits of greyish white grime still clinging to the ends, as a shallow flood of precum pooled around the hairs and slid down his length. His cock twitched. The insides seemed to tighten. He started moving it again. The strands. Soon he became so soaked in precum, the slide was nearly smooth within. He quickened his pace.
Inho lowered himself even further against the tub floor until his mouth was submerged in the foamy water, his hand still working the twist of hair in and out of his cock as he moaned into the water, blurred to weakened burbles. Sometimes he paused when he had it three quarters in and then started tugging it out, teasing himself further by suddenly pushing it hard back in and then slowly tugging it an inch back out again. He groaned. The hairs caressed him so painfully. He kept going. Like he was fucking cleaning himself out, only in this case, he was only making himself dirtier. He might get an infection like this. He might never come again.
He reached back behind himself and circled his finger along his asshole until it relaxed enough for him to work the tip of it in. He squeezed back on it and pushed the hair back down into his cock one last time and moments later, shot a load underwater. The milky strands of cum separated along the surface around his thighs as he panted, careful not to suck too much water in. He tasted foam, his own fluids. The twisted stick of hair floated up and scraped his cheek. It was still mostly intact.
Inho let it dry out along a folded piece of toilet paper as he pocketed the rest of the dislodged hair into his Ziploc bag. He wrapped the hair stick in cling wrap and put it into a second Ziploc and folded it many times over so it would fit inside the first one. It was the first of many treasures he would take —infused with himself so that he and Gihun could be together in every way. In all ways. If he did this enough, it would become inevitable.
He would have him. He would have him now.
…
Hair is the easiest to collect.
He found it everywhere —along the floor, in the bathrooms, on the counter, between the hinges of the doors, in the carpets, wedged beneath the borders of the walls, along the kitchen tiles, in the rug covering the stairs, along the window sill. In between boxes, beneath the fridge, inside his clothes. He found enough to fill a jar two thirds full. He starts to use all the jars in the back of the cupboard, taking them all underground.
A broken zipper. An elastic. A dropped milk clip. He takes the useless things. The things no one else will love. Day by day they add up and fill up the jars. Inho fills them up with himself along with it. He no longer tissues, or shoots into the dirt. He shoots it right inside the jars. Feels it cool down inside the glass. If he wakes in the middle of the night, he screws one of the lids open and urinates inside, holding his nose from the smell.
He’s filled two and half jars so far. He buries them when they’re full.
Underneath the house is where the insulation ends. It is cold and at night it becomes even colder. The walls rub off into mere unbroken dirt where the paint remains unfinished. Dirt makes the ground uneven, a slightly redder hue compared to the walls, which falls steeply into the far end of the floor several meters down. Inho has attached a thirty-foot climbing rope to one of the steel frames of the window so he can lower himself down as far as he likes.
Thirty-seven by eighty by one hundred and seventy-four inches. Roughly three by seven by fifteen feet. Inho’s measured it with a pencil and an old paper IKEA measuring tape he found lodged among plaster-caked CDs, magazines and old newspapers stuffed inside the two white plastic milk crates half-sunken into the dirt at the very bottom of the room. Wrapped inside the newspapers are stacks of hundreds of burned DVDs with their titles scrawled in thin black or red Sharpie. Most of them are foreign films. American. He recognizes some of them. Thin Red Line. The Sixth Sense. Schindler’s List. The Truman Show. Apollo 13. Several of the names were too smudged or messy to decipher.
Home Alone 2. A Bug’s Life. Toy Story. October Sky. Elegy. The Mask. The Matrix.
He promises himself he’ll watch every movie that Gihun owns. He’ll watch them instead of sleeping.
…
He has a dream they’re at the grocery store together. He’s manning the cart, elbows resting along the bar, one foot planted on the green-painted steel cage between the wheels. Leisurely pushing it along as Gihun strolled ahead. He doesn’t know what they’re looking for. Maybe they’re not really looking for anything. The cart is about a third full, the bottom is completely covered in boxes of things. He doesn’t remember any of them anymore, but he imagines they were the usual fare that made sense in dreams and not real life —assorted cake mixes, cupcakes, fairy bread, butter pecan tarts, lemon tarts, broiled egg tarts, powdered mashed potatoes, breaded frozen halibut, chicken nuggets, spring rolls, Hägen Dazs ice cream bars and household cleaning products that were on sale.
Dreams are strange. You never realized you were in one most of the time and so you couldn’t do the things that would confirm you were dreaming —Inho imagines that if he were to open up any one of the packages he saw in his dream, they would not have what he was looking for inside. He would open the cake mix and find cat litter. Or rocks. Or dead mice. He’d open the box of frozen halibut and find feather dusters. The chicken nuggets would turn into foul clumps of mustard as soon as he picked one out.
He remembers telling Gihun to get anything he wanted. He hadn’t meant anything by it. It wasn’t a declaration of love or commitment or commemoration for a special day —it wasn’t any of that. It had just been another day. Inho had said it with a hint of mild exhaustion. As though he’d run out of ideas on how to make him happy. And he’d just wanted to go home. Gihun had made a faint sound of acknowledgement and they’d continued on ahead and ended up going in circles around the frozen food aisle, trying to figure out why everything was mysteriously wrapped in tin foil and completely unlabeled. By the time they reached the cashier, Inho realized he’d left his wallet at home and went into a panic, apologizing profusely to Gihun and asking him to hold their place in the line while he ran back home to get it.
Even as he woke up on the floor in the attic, he was still thinking about how there wouldn’t be enough time for him to run and come back before their cart reached the cashier and then he was uselessly reasoning with himself that Gihun would be reasonable enough to let the other customers go ahead until he came back. It took him another few minutes to realize that none of this was real. After the initial relief, there came an unfathomable wave of loss that hung over him for the rest of the day.
…
It was strange seeing himself on the feed. Inho stumbled upon it one evening when he was wiping down his laptop and accidentally tapped the saved video from the previous night. A half-finished can of Dongwon golbaengi sat next to his keyboard, the spoon stolen from the kitchen. A few drops of the sweet briny broth still dotted the surface near the touchpad. Inho chewed slowly, ignoring the sandy bits stuck to the tender yet elastic meat. Whelk was far superior to prawn. He hasn’t had it in years.
Weeks had passed. He had the daily footage all saved as icons on his home screen, he was somewhat shameless that way. It was fine. It wasn’t like anyone would see it anyways. Anyone other than himself.
There he was. Crawling out of the cupboards while Gihun had been in the shower. He was easy enough to spot, he wore all black. And there he was licking the floor. What? Had he licked the floor? He didn’t remember that. And then he was taking off his pants.
The more he watched, the stranger it became. He no longer felt like he was watching himself. He felt like he was watching someone who only vaguely resembled his own likeness move mechanically across the kitchen floor like a wounded beetle with extensive brain damage. What the shit. Was this how he looked all the time? Jesus. No wonder his parents had wanted to take him to counseling earlier in the year. It had been a tough term. He was failing most of his classes. The only one he’d marginally cared about was that one bird course about analyzing film from the nineties. There was a day where they just played The Matrix. And then Good Will Hunting. Magnolia. Shawshank Redemption. Silence of the Lambs. It was a great class. He didn’t have to talk to anyone. Didn’t have to pretend for anything. He was free.
He found a way to access the camera remotely. The program was simple enough. With a few taps and less than twenty minutes later, Inho could schedule the video to shut off after six-thirty.
Maybe later on he would disable the camera completely. No more eyes on them. Him.
They would finally be alone. Together.
…
His earliest memory was a screen. Seeing faces through it. Trying to grasp at them, smack them when they stopped looking at him, talking to him. All these faces, these stretchy warped swathes of colour and light that babbled and fawned over him. He breathed over them, drooled over them. Cried over them. Pushed his face into them, trying to get closer and closer. Warm. Warm flatness was all he got. Their faces were always hard, flat and warm. Sometimes the faces stopped moving, contorted to a sharp, disturbing angle and he would scream and shake the screen until they moved again. He would dream of these faces. He would see them everywhere and in everything that populated his family’s first house. In the plants. Along the undersides of mugs. Bowls. Wooden paneling. Rust stains around the stovetop. Crumpled blankets. In the swirling, indecipherable bronze-marble patterns along the bathroom counter.
At night he wanders around the house, looking for these faces. Finding new ones. Watching the old ones materialize in familiar places. In the rugs. In the sink. In the trees. In the whorls of the wooden knob at the bottom of the staircase. They’re all coming back to him. Slowly.
They are here for him when no one else is.
Hands he remembered far more clearly than his parents’ faces. His mother’s were thin and pale with a slight swan neck deformity on both ring fingers that made them taper towards the second finger, and unable to align when she flattened her hand. It is the only deformity he knows that actually makes the body more beautiful. He inherited it, but only on his left hand, both his pinky and ring finger and the tapering is even slighter. Most of the time, it’s not even noticeable. He remembers once trying to bend the first joint of his ring finger so it would be beautiful like his mother’s and then when that didn’t work, wrapping a length of sewing thread around it until his fingertip went purple and lost circulation. His mother didn’t notice until he clutched at the edge of her blouse, staining it with traces of blood wicked off where the thread cut into his skin. She unwound the thread, held his hand under a cold tap and then set him back on the floor. He didn’t cry. He’d stopped after realizing it didn’t work.
He remembers his father’s hands even less. They were larger and more square around nails which were always slightly torn or frayed at the edges. He could not remember their colour because he often only felt them in the dark. There was a vague sense of soft, fine hairs tickling his lips from the base of the fingers, but their presence remained uncertain. His father’s hands smelled cold and metallic even in the summer and when they weren’t mussing his hair or squeezing his waist, they weren’t there much at all. He was often away. When he came back, Inho always buried his nose into his palms and tried to guess where he had been based on their scent. Sometimes they were sweet and water-like, recalling the smell of fruits he’d never eaten before, other times they were salty and bitter, chemical and sometimes they were sour like leather, or something strange he couldn’t quite place. Sometimes he wondered if they were even the same hands at all. He has no memory of his father’s voice.
Skin feels softer than he remembers it feeling when he was young. The girl is pulling him into an unevenly lit hallway in the dormitory and he cannot stop staring at the blend of dyed blonde streaks in her hair. There was a table in his house that had the exact same colour gradation as her hair. Jennifer Aniston from Friends. When he reaches out to touch the hair he expects it to be hard and flat like wood even though he knows it’s impossible. She turns her head around and laughs, showing her teeth. Moisture specks his cheek. Inho flinches. Real faces scare him. They scare him sometimes with their endless shifting dimensions, their malleability, how the muscles stretch and contort and wrinkle and become near unrecognizable under extreme duress. Faces are mountains that move. His to eviscerate.
Inside the room he tells her to get on all fours after she takes her clothes off. She’s laughing as she does it, hand and knees on the carpet, even wiggling her hips in anticipation. Adjusting herself, widening her thighs, lengthening her arms, walking her hands back and forth until he’s satisfied. He picks up her shirt from the floor and ties it around her face. Then sits down on the bed. She waits. Another giggle escapes.
He remains where he is, only watching her. Almost forty minutes pass. She is no longer laughing.
He leaves while she’s still kneeling.
There were more. More or less the same. Things always went sour right when he told them to go still, hold their position. Like a lamp, a chair, a couch. A vase. It confused them. Caused them deep distress. They started crying, screaming, begging. Demanding to know what was wrong. It was almost funny how upset they got when he never laid a single finger on them. He never hurt them at all. They did it to themselves. Sometimes he’ll bring in a third party and fuck them on the bed, but mostly he would make them also sit down and watch. It was spectacle, it was art. They didn’t understand it.
He started trying with men. Some of them got into it. Got attached. Too attached.
Inho pulled away. It was the only way he knew how to be.
…
Inho has a recurring dream where he separates from himself and merges with Gihun completely. Having full possession of his body. Curling in each one of his fingers one by one, running one slowish, rough-whorled fingertip across his lips, feeling the softness of each individual hair on his brow. Melting into a liquid blueprint of his whole form, inhabiting every living fibre of his being, breathing the colour back into his blood. He wants to memorize him. He wants to melt into his skin.
This is not love.
There’s a movie where they find a portal into John Malkovich’s brain on the half floor between the seventh and eighth of an otherwise unremarkable office building in New York. The ceiling is so low you have to bend over double just to wait in line to descend through the hatchway that’s barely the size of a dog door and then you’re shooting down into the dark until suddenly you’re standing in a flat, depthless space, seeing through the two bright holes of Malkovich’s eyes. You never know where you’ll end up, what he’s been doing right before you came. Sometimes you’re in the shower, staring at the water spattering around your reddened toes. Sometimes you’re outside. Sometimes you’re in bed with someone. Sometimes you’re by yourself. You want to think there’s some higher meaning to this, but there isn’t. You’re just there. Inside his head. Feeling life as he lives it. Only as long as before someone else jumps in, kicks you back out into the real world. And then you’re waiting to get back in again.
Inho’s not sure if he wants to live inside his mind or just live a shadow of his life. Watching him. Watching things.
You could spend your whole life just watching things. It’s not the worst thing you could do. At least you’re not hurting anybody. At least you’re still you.
They met once outside. It was an otherwise ordinary day in mid October, slightly damp, smelling like it might rain. By then, Inho had been living underneath his house for about a week.
He saw him standing by the lake.
He wore an oversized plaid over-shirt that day, the same pale grey jeans. The wind ruffled the strands of his hair beneath his cap as he stood, hands in his pockets. Inho hesitated for a second, then bounded right up to him.
The water sparkled. It seemed unreal.
“Anything?” Inho grinned, staring up at him.
The man seemed to pause for a moment, squinting.
“Sorry?”
“I mean, anything down there? Are they biting?”
“Oh. Well, uhm,” He laughed, somewhat uneasily. “I don’t know. I wasn’t really looking.”
“Well, let’s see then,” Inho knelt close to the water and stared. At first, he saw nothing. Then, a shift. Some tiny movement farther away. A whole teeming cloud of them, black as tadpoles, writhed against the glimmering surface by the reeds. The water was the colour of the rocks beneath, a warm molten brown edged in green from the lake weeds. He dipped his hands right in and suddenly two or three fish swam across his palms. Black and silver, a streak of red, their eyes like gooey pinheads. “Oh, here they are. They came to me.”
He lifted his hands out of the water. A tiny fish flipped itself back and forth against his palms, but when he looked up Gihun had already left.
By the time he had disappeared around the bend, the fish had stopped moving. Inho let it fall on the grass, tasting salt in the back of his throat.
He should’ve gone after him. Why hadn’t he. He thought about it all the time.
There are days when Inho just wants to crawl out of his skin. Unzip that semi-translucent soft casing of blood and protein and just let it all hang loose. He wants someone, just one person to finally see him for who he is. Whatever the hell that looks like. Maybe even he himself doesn’t know. You spend so much of your time trying to be normal you end up becoming the thing you’re always trying to be and then you look in the mirror and you can’t figure out who the fuck you are. You’re just a fog. Shapeless, tasteless fog. Nothing pretending to be something. You come out of the shower and you can’t wipe the steam off because that’s where you went. Once it clears, there’s nothing left.
Inho can’t figure out if he wants to be Gihun or if he just doesn’t want to be anything at all. Bodies are a burden. He remembers hearing something from somewhere a few years back about someone wanting to be a tree or just the air and how freeing that would be. Just a consciousness floating around not having to answer to anyone, not having to fulfil any needs. Sure, it sounds funny. Stupid, even. He remembers thinking, yeah it might be pretty cool, but then that would mean everyone else was just floating around invisible too and that would be a shame because he was, still, in the end, a very visual person, and fuck it if he enjoyed admiring all the damn bodies around him. You couldn’t just free yourself and then deny the beauty of the world. Or maybe he would be the only one moving around invisible, but then how would he talk to anyone if they couldn’t see him? Wouldn’t that make it all just so terribly boring? Just going around watching people?
Sure, he’s one to talk. But that wasn’t all of it. Far from it. There’s something there. Something in the way. Inho could leave. He could leave anytime he wants. Gihun wouldn’t know. He would never know. And yet Inho stays. He still stays.
…
For a while, he tries to help him.
Gihun could be forgetful sometimes. Careless, even. He’d once had the stove set to high while a plate of canned teokbokki steamed in the wok. Several minutes later, Inho smelled burning metal. He hurriedly wrenched on the tap and dumped a bowl of sizzling water in before turning the heat off. The cupboards banged loudly against his legs. They banged again when he went back inside. Through the gap in the doors, he watched as Gihun padded in moments later, checking the wok and grumbling to himself, turning the heat back on. He hadn’t even checked the cupboards that time.
Other times it was the oven. Sometimes there wasn’t even anything inside. It’d be impossible to tell for a while —Gihun would often leave the inner light off. And then the strange, inexplicable warmth would bloom on his left side along the wall. Inho’s certain he’s unintentionally cleaned off the remaining orangish-grey patches of dust grease stuck along those heat dials from the number of times he’s had to anxiously switch them off. Even his mother hadn’t been this bad at it.
He wondered if Gihun had hearing issues. Could it really deteriorate so quickly at his age? Or perhaps his hearing hadn’t been great to start with, or he may have gotten injured in his youth and never fully recovered. Inho recalled hearing a relative detail how they went deaf in one ear during college after going to the nurse’s office to flush their ear of wax. It had built up over the years from wearing earplugs while jogging and picking at it with their finger and so they had no other choice than to get it flushed. It had been the early eighties. Things were less strictly checked. The instrument in question was crude and cheap —the force of the water going in tore the already broken skin inside their eardrum and left them with a permanent hole in their left ear. Could Gihun be like that? He couldn’t be. He would wear something if he did. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who had too much pride to forgo that and live his life willfully and partially disabled. It would almost most definitely affect his work performance. He wouldn’t risk that.
Then he was willfully deaf. Which was almost most definitely worse.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it.
Some things were merely annoying. Unwashed mugs left on the nightstand, or sitting along or inside bookshelves. Crumbs on the bed. A dirty plate left atop the toilet tank, the toilet unflushed. Microwavable meal cartons piled on the coffee table. Ramen cartons underneath. Food wrappers on the floor. Wet clothes left in the dryer. Clothes left on the floor reeking of piss. Blood in the bathroom sink. The stairwell. Vomit in the bathtub.
He’d started wearing gloves, sometimes a face-mask.
These things would be noticeable. He couldn’t fix them entirely. He’d clean a plate, but leave a few specks, a smear. He’d leave the wet clothes in the basket outside, hang a few. He’d rinse out the vomit. He’d leave the blood. At least it didn’t stink. He found himself sometimes crossing over to the realm of absurdity where he’d pick up a shirt, wash it, dry it and then return it to its same kicked-on, crumpled state on the carpet. Who would notice? Gihun clearly hadn’t, if he had, he would’ve picked them all up by now. Inho doesn’t take them underground anymore. He’s run out of space.
He once found him passed out on the couch with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
The television was on in the dark.
He must have been there for a while. The glass tray was nearly full of ash and there were at least eight other stubs half-buried in, more stamped out on the carpet. Magazines lay scattered on the floor, the useless ones that came in the mail full of advertisements and coupons that had already expired, also smudged in ash. There was a near empty Shin ramen carton under the table with dried-out soup crusts along the inside, full of even more smashed stubs. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in months. There were two small, dead roaches in it.
Inho reached down and pinched the joint lightly, positioning his fingers as far from the burning tip as possible. It wasn’t easy —there wasn’t much of it left. The paper was somewhat stuck to the underside of Gihun’s lips and there was a slight resistance as he pulled, his mouth getting tugged along with it. There was something almost morosely infantile about it. Gihun made a soft, unconscious sound as the cigarette was slowly unpeeled from him and bits of ash broke off and fell onto his shirt and then the carpet. Inho was still wearing his gloves. He hadn’t even stubbed the bit out before Gihun suddenly pulled himself up to his elbows and threw up all over the carpet.
Inho kept his arm along the backs of his shoulders as Gihun fell back down, wheezing. Vomit stuck to his shirt, coated his lip in a loose, warm trail down to his neck.
Luckily, most of it had gotten onto the scattered magazines. Inho loosened his arm from underneath him and swallowed down the tight lump in his throat. They may have been laid out here for exactly that purpose. He’d known it would happen. He’d known at some point, he wouldn’t make it to the bathroom fast enough. Or he no longer cared. Inho picked out the last couple napkins left in the wrinkled plastic pack on the table and started wiping off the vomit around Gihun’s mouth and then his neck. His shirt. The bits in his hair. A dropped smear on his sweatpants. He wiped his own shirt last. Most of it had only gotten on his arms and they were bare. There were more spatters on his jeans, bright against the dark, faded denim. Inho felt something warm. One of his knees had unfortunately smeared into a nearby pool of it.
He got up slowly and went into the kitchen to rinse himself. The light was off. Orangish bits coagulated along the drain and Inho picked them out by hand, still wearing his gloves. Peeled them off, tossed them in the trash when he was done. He tore off a few paper towels from the counter and held them under warm water. He went back to the living room.
Tears had formed in his eyes. He let them sting and roll down his face as he cleaned the same spots around Gihun’s mouth and chin, folding the towel in half when he reached his neck and then folding it again when he reached his shirt. He used the second towel for the cushion, the edges of the table and then folded it for his pants. He tried not to miss anything. It was hard—the light from the television was unevenly blocked out by sharp, irregular shadows cast by the mess on the table. He rolled Gihun back safely onto his back and then tried to position the smaller cushions along his left to prevent him from rolling over. He went back into the kitchen for the waste basket and scooped up the magazines one by one, not caring that he hadn’t put on another set of gloves. Vomit rolled back and forth along the drenched covers as he dumped them in. Some got on his hands. Inho tied the bag up and went back for a second bag to wrap it in and went outside for the first time in months to dump it out by the curb.
The cool air surprised him. He sank down and sat on the asphalt of the driveway and cried into his arms.
…
One standard white garbage bag, two-thirds full. That was how much he was taking.
He’d emptied out more than half of Gihun’s hamper. It hadn’t been touched in weeks. He used the clothes to wrap the jars he’d kept underground. It was no longer possible to tell what was inside them. The semen had taken on the colour of whatever he’d stored inside, pulling threads of pigment from the plastic or printed paper, cigarette stubs and food wrappers. He had nine jars. That was as much as he could lug around without fear of hitting something and shattering them. And then he would bury them in his family’s backyard. They would never know. Everything would be as it was before.
He would take the bus home.
The shower was still running.
Inho sat at the kitchen table, staring up at the ceiling. Maybe it was something else. He stuck one imperceptibly shaking finger in his ear, then the other. Pulled them out one at a time. The water thrummed on. He had the bag leaning against the side door. Outside the late sky was clear. A somewhat elongated square of light ran down the opposite wall, leaving a blurred bluish shadow of the plants on the sill. The square trembled and then blinked in and out of view.
There were two sudden hard streaking noises, skin against tile. And then a muffled thud.
Inho ran up the stairs.
The thrumming of the water grew louder as he went down the hall, heart hammering in time to his bare feet drumming along the carpet, finally reaching the master bedroom. His jaw tightened. It was uncomfortably warm. Moisture hung in the air, even the wall felt wet. The sickenly sweet chemical smell of Tresemme Colour shampoo invaded his mouth. The door was already parted, a thin gap of light showing. Steam poured out.
Inho went in there, nearly slipping on the soaked tile.
He yanked back the curtain.
Gihun was slumped on his knees, the whole of his body tilted towards the wall. His clothes were still on, soaked to the bone. The shower ran on. His head was ducked down, turned away. There was still foam in his hair.
Inho sank down and pulled his shoulders towards him, catching the side of his head in one panicked hand before it toppled hard to his chest. Oh, God. He wasn’t breathing.
“Hey, hey,” he said, tugging at his arm. It came out as mere breath. Useless. Barely a sound at all. His mouth moved to form the familiar shapes of the words he wanted to say, but his jaw wouldn’t stop trembling and his throat was closing up. He could barely swallow. He wiped at the foam in Gihun’s hair, still wearing his gloves. “-say something, please, I need you to say something. Seong-ahjussi, say something. Please, I need to hear your voice. I n-need to…”
He stopped when he could hear himself again.
Streaks of foam stuck to the black latex, mixed with blood, turning the foam pink. Inho peeled the gloves off and then in a panic, put them back on and tore a long strip of toilet paper off the roll, not caring it was damp. He wrapped the softened paper around the spot that was bleeding and pulled down a face towel and cushioned Gihun’s head with it, while he went back into the room to search for towels.
He returned with two large ones and bent down to wrap the first one around Gihun’s shoulders and folded one end into the other to keep it from slipping. He wrapped the second one around his legs even as the back of it soaked into the water along the tub floor. He turned the shower off.
When Inho tried to pull him out, he wouldn’t budge. He was in a bad position, still mostly leaned away and the water weighed him down even more. Inho loosened his grip. If he wasn’t careful, he’d hit Gihun’s head against the tub’s ledge and injure him further. He couldn’t risk that. He ended up cushioning Gihun’s head against his chest while he got his arms around his waist and tried to find his center of gravity to make him easier to pull out. He pulled. Gihun’s wet hair pressed hard into his neck as he pulled and pulled and finally got him half over the ledge. He grimaced. Now he was carrying nearly all of his weight, equally drenched. Water slid over the edge of the tub and spilled all over the tiles. The tissue had melted into Gihun’s scalp.
Finally his legs slid down from the ledge and Inho got him fully out of the tub. He kept his arms around him, holding him tight until he heard a low gurgle and felt Gihun cough out water against him, spattering it along the floor. Slowly he regained his breath again.
He ended up pulling him out with a sleeping bag rolled underneath him, dragging from one end.
He didn’t know how he managed to get Gihun onto the bed, but he did and then he was peeling off his wet clothes and tossing them into the sink, then running back and tossing them into his near empty hamper. He kept the towels wrapped around him, already half-soaked and ran back to the tub to grab the face towel to cushion the side of his head. The blood seemed to be drying. He pulled the covers up to Gihun’s neck and then finally pulled off his foam-smeared gloves. He felt Gihun’s hands beneath the blankets. They were cold. He held them until they were warmer.
Inho lay on the carpet beneath the bed, still catching his breath. He’d never been so scared in his life. His hands were shaking.
How could he be so stupid.
He could not leave him. He would never leave him.
…
The longest he’s ever stayed down there is two days. He never stood up the whole time. Just shifted around, on his side, then his back, and then his stomach, then back on his back again. He could’ve gotten up to sit hunched by his laptop, but he hadn’t. Hadn’t had the will to. Once you stay down long enough you don’t want to get back up. You just want to lay there. It starts to feel nice and even if it doesn’t, it feels like too much work to move. That day, Inho hit a record. Eighteen times. Eighteen times he jacked off and more than half of those times, he hadn’t even had to hear the actual sounds of Gihun jacking it in the kitchen. He heard it in his mind. Saw it too. Clearer than anything. He had to switch hands every few times to stave off the cramps, even then it was still quite the workout. It wasn’t perfect. He hadn’t come every time. Sometimes he went at it too hard and got nowhere, just damp underarms, sweat down his neck, a tired wrist. It felt so stupid, then. So useless. Those two days, he didn't eat. Didn’t drink. He felt like he didn’t deserve it. He chewed on a piece of foam until he fell asleep.
The day after that Inho ran to the kitchen sink so fast he nearly twisted his ankle on the way there. He latched his mouth onto the rushing tap, gulping down enormous throatfuls of water until the front of his shirt was nearly stuck to his skin. Streaks of water ran down his pants, wet his toes. He went into every bathroom of the house and drank from every water source it had. Then he stumbled out into the backyard and lay down on the grass. He felt like he would explode. Moments later, he dragged his pants down, still lying on the grass and watched his piss arc up into the fucking sky in a glittering bright stream and then drench the shins of his jeans. He caught some in his hands and drank it.
He was laughing all the way into the shower.
There’s a voice that’s telling him to eat the curtains. He doesn’t immediately listen to it. He’s hearing a lot of different ones now. Voices. It’s not clear which one is Gihun. He’ll only listen to the one that’s Gihun. Gihun tells him what to do. He lives in his house. He has to abide by his rules. If he doesn’t, something bad will happen. Gihun will find him and put him in the oven. Snap his limbs and hide him in the washing machine. String him up like the curtains, flay him open and make him into a rug. Turn him into glue. He’ll make use of every part of his body and once he’s fully incorporated into several pieces of furniture, Gihun will put the house up for sale and donate all his body parts to the Goodwill. Several people will own him in the next couple of years. His own family may unwittingly buy pieces of him back into their own house as they send out a search party to look for their sweet and stupid, wayward son. His mother will overdose on wine. His father will jump into a lake. So he starts eating the curtains. Bits of wool get stuck in his teeth, the material is too tough and thick, but Inho gnaws on it all the same until his tongue goes numb and he feels the fabric tear just slightly. A hole smaller than a pinhead. He swallows the thread.
That day Inho goes through each room and only gnaws on the things Gihun tells him to. The steel knob of the storage closet. The already frayed corner of the nightstand in the guest bedroom. The chair leg. The window in the attic. The handle on the freezer. The fourth stair in the basement. The rim of the Home Depot bucket outside by the garage. The fleshy, tear-shaped leaves of the house plant along the windowsill. Inho chews on the leaves until the bitter juice fills his mouth and scrambles upstairs to vomit in the bathtub. He doesn’t walk anymore. He’s on all fours.
This is what you were meant to do, the voice tells him. This is all you will ever be.
One day Inho makes a whole casserole for him. He can’t help it. He has all the ingredients. There’s a crumpled sack of pasta twisted shut by an elastic stuffed near the back of the second kitchen drawer. It probably hasn’t been touched in at least a few years. The plastic can of Italian bread crumbs sitting next to it looks about the same. There’s an unused block of white cheddar in the fridge. Inho pulls out a head of broccoli from the lower compartment, along with two carrots and a somewhat deflated red bell pepper. Instead of marinara sauce, he squeezes gochujang all over the pasta steeped in milk, water and a two-month expired can of chicken broth. He uses scissors to cut eight slices of American cheese into thin strips over the floating zigzags of gochujang. He throws in every spice and herb available in the cabinets. Oregano. Thyme. Nutmeg. Coriander. It smells like a middle school science experiment. He cuts himself by accident through the gloves while splitting one of the carrots with a knife and just lets some of his blood dot the wooden cutting board, then holds his gloved finger over the diced vegetables as though he’s garnishing a plate. He barely feels the sting.
He wraps his finger in a wad of clean tissue before sliding the hefty aluminum tray into the oven. He sits on the floor for nearly an hour.
He fights it. He fights the voice telling him he is not meant to go on two legs. Just for today. Just for today, he can.
Before it even fully cools, Inho picks it up and braces himself for the stinging heat and strides to the sliding doors. He brings his foot over onto the border and swings the door to the side. Walks through the grass in sock feet. Dew soaks into his soles and by the time he reaches the sad strip of garden soil by the fence, not much of his feet are dry. He stares at the thing in his arms, the gleaming milky yellowish amalgamation of pasta and cheese and shriveled vegetables, bits of orange, red and green, the places where dots of his blood have browned and faded until they were near indistinguishable from the broiled patches of cheese. Only he knew they were there. The inside of his mouth watered. It actually smelled quite appetizing.
He dumps it onto the ground.
Several pieces of pale, torn pasta bounce away into the leaves of dried tomato stalks littering the soil, yellowed at the edges and full of insect-bitten holes. Cheese falls off in clumps, bits of carrot and pepper rolling away with it, but for the most part the gooey casserole remains intact. It looks like a chunk of wet cement dyed an uncanny, funhouse yellow. It looks like something Big Bird regurgitated after spending too much time on the wrong side of the street.
He sinks to his knees. Immediately he starts to gather handfuls of wet, cold soil to bury it, smear it out of sight. He was stupid. He forgot to dig a hole first. Now he’d have to work even harder to hide it, the warm, still-hot pasta stinging his hands as he tries in vain to flatten it into the ground. Anything still solid turns to mush between his gloved fingers as he squeezes them to fists and tries to dig at the same time that he is trying to break the lumps apart. Soon he strips the gloves off. It’s almost relieving in a way. Destroying it all. Soon his fingernails are caked in dirt. Dirt sticks to his hands. He shovels a handful of dirt-caked casserole into his mouth and almost immediately spits it back out. It’s good he never ate anything in the morning. His eyes start to sting.
He feels insane. He feels like he’s burying a child.
Inho swallows down his sobs, the bashed up casserole still mostly visible, just broken up into smaller yellow pieces along the dead leaves.
It wasn’t fair. He could be more. He could be so much more.
There are things he wishes he could do for him. He could cook for him. He could cook for him everyday. He could get better at it and then Gihun wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore. He could repair his bike. He could dig up the backyard and have a pool built for him. He could build it himself. He could strip the fence down and extend it far back enough to build him a greenhouse. A huge, stunning greenhouse. They could bring in tropical plants from all over the place, have stuff hanging down from the roof, all of the remaining flora surrounding them expertly placed so that nearly everything received enough sun. They’d have an indoor sprinkler system that recycled rainwater. He could put a hammock in there. They could carve out a little space in the corner, bring in some spare chairs from the kitchen or even build a bench, then a coffee table. A mini-fridge. They could keep books in the fridge. Beer in the freezer box. They could get rid of old paneling in the attic and put in a sunroof. They could repaint the whole house.
If he did all of these things, maybe Gihun would finally forgive him. Maybe Gihun would finally tell him yes. Yes, he can come out of there. Yes, he can walk. Yes, he can eat.
Inho can only subtract and he can only do so sparingly. The Ziploc has remained untouched for the past few days. He pulled out one of the shirts Gihun had stuffed in the far back of his closet, something he has never worn since Inho moved in. The entire left sleeve is gone. That’s how much he has eaten so far. Gihun told him to. Gihun said it was okay. The fabric was soft, it wouldn’t hurt him. He can swallow it down. He can do anything.
There’s a day where he has to stay near the toilet nearly the whole day.
He had started small.
Dandruff. Nail clippings. Strands of hair. Pilled cotton pulled off on older shirts. Loose threads. Dust. Small buttons found underneath the couch. A paperclip. Whole box of paper clips. Chunks of staples pressed into an old eraser. A fridge magnet. A latex glove peeled inside out, already tossed in the trash. Used tissues. A rubber headband. Foam peanuts. And then the curtains. Now clothes.
Once the canned food in the crawlspace ran out, Inho stopped eating. He would take nothing from the fridge, the cupboards, anything. He would barely drink tap water and even that he limited himself to two or three mouthfuls a day. Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes none at all. Whatever Gihun told him to do. He would only listen to him. He had to earn his place. He would always have to earn his place.
Because this is what love is. This is what his love has to be.
Gihun works hard. He works so hard that by the end of the day he barely has the energy to reheat leftovers in the fridge, and then when he brings the dishes to the sink, he rests his hands on the counter and stares at them for nearly a full minute before doing them. Sometimes he’s scrubbing a bowl and he pauses while the tap’s still running, just staring off into the wall. Staring at the water. He’ll drop the rag onto the drain, shut the water off and go over to the couch to sit when he has only a spoon left. Then he’ll go back and take that spoon and toss it in the trash and then stare at it, then bend down to pick it back out and toss it back in the sink. He’ll spend almost ten minutes cleaning it. He’ll use a hand to wipe the corners of his eyes and soon his breathing will get ragged.
Sometimes Inho can’t tell what Gihun hates more —cleaning the dishes or eating from them. Maybe he was a poor cook. Maybe it was deeper than that.
He coughed and a spray of blood dotted his fingers. He coughed again. More blood. And then something darker —a piece of hair? A thread? It was small and hard. Sharp.
He stuck three fingers down his throat and coughed until the toilet bowl was stained pink around the edges. Dark, half-melted objects started appearing in the water. Inho recognized none of them. He stared at the water, the steady plinking of blood leaving his lip and hitting the surface until the darkened objects disappeared. Soon the water became red.
It was fine.
Inho started leaving things around the house. A sock on the floor. A glass on the table, then another along the windowsill. A balled up tissue in the bathroom sink. A pile of cereal in the tub. He almost drags the entire couch into the backyard before he stops himself. He puts the table lamp there instead.
Nothing happens.
Gihun’s body hadn’t caught up with his voice. His eyes were still unseeing. His hands, unfeeling. They weren’t listening to each other. His mind and body separated when he left in the mornings and when he returned, they remained that way. He stayed on autopilot. Picked things off the floor, put them away. Tossed them in the trash. The sink. The hamper. He does all of this without seeing them. Without seeing him. He does all of this without seeing anything.
One day, Inho couldn't take it anymore.
Less than a minute after Gihun left, Inho raced to the kitchen and began jacking off against the counter. It doesn’t take long. Under a minute, almost. He hasn’t touched himself in weeks. Too much anger. Too much weakness. In the most literal sense, most of the time now Inho didn’t have the energy or the will to bring himself to orgasm. His jeans felt looser, everything felt looser. He’d lose his erection constantly even as he viciously stroked and when he did gain it back, he never stayed hard long enough. The house was draining him. It was killing him somehow.
And now all of a sudden, he had come. A miracle, a true miracle.
He hastily undid his jeans, teetering back and forth, one leg then the other, slipping them out his feet. Still clutching the waistband, he peered inside, examining his handiwork. Well. Not just his hands, but still. Some of it was still wet. Good. More smell that way. It gleamed semi-translucent along the inner in-seam, the smeared thinnish trails of cum running down the dark denim like small ice floes in the night. For a moment, Inho considered flipping them inside out so Gihun would be able to see it well, it would unmistakeable, that much he knew. He thought better of it. He loved a surprise as much as anyone else. He wouldn’t spoil all the fun. The look of horror on Gihun’s face when he knew, when he peered inside. He wished there was a camera in the pants as well. Oh well. He’d see it well enough. He’d see it soon.
Inho stuffed the semen-stained jeans into the back of the fridge, a haphazardly folded pile, and made sure to clear out all the other food items on that level so he’d be able to find it easily. His heart hammered in his throat. He’d long since given up on hiding.
And now the wait. Counting the hours before he came home.
He heard the keys outside, then the door. Thudding shut. The rustle of clothing, then sighing. He hid in one of the cupboards. Footfalls drummed against the carpet, then tapped the tile. The fridge door opened.
There was some shifting around, some glass gently knocking into porcelain, some sliding. Plastic crunching. Then the fridge was shut again. Inho watched him eat. Watched him heat leftovers in the microwave, then sit at the table and chew slowly. Kimchi and seaweed. Rice with egg. Some salad. He took a bit longer than usual. Then he set the dishes in the sink and went upstairs. A while later, Inho heard the shower running.
Inho climbed out and pulled open the fridge door. His jeans were still there.
He ran out and collapsed in the backyard, screaming. Fingers gouging the dirt, tearing up grass in rapid, bracing fistfuls, his tightened palms scoured red with each rip until a sizable patch of loosened earth appeared before him. Then he didn’t even stop to grab a stick or stone or some other stray natural object, just clawing straight into the ground with his hands, seething.
SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME SEE ME
“See me,” he heaved under his breath. His knees were stained green, grass smeared on raw skin. Grass juice. Sweet enough to drink. He could suck it through his teeth. Hah. Fuck. He bit his cheek so hard it bled. “I need you to see me. Why can't you see me…? Hah? I am everywhere. I left myself everywhere for you. Why can’t you see…?” Tears began to form in his eyes, burning softly. The ground blurred. “Why can’t you see…? Why can’t you see…?”
The sky taunted him. So blue, so clear. So easy to see.
“You can't see,” He sighed, shaking his head. A smile formed on his face, still wet with tears. “No. I need to show you. I need to show myself to you. Yes. You'll see. You’ll see, my love. You'll see me soon.”
…
In the end, he just stood there. In his bedroom. Waiting.
The car pulled into the driveway, the engine clicked off. A muffled clap —the car door. Footfalls on the granite.
Keys jangling in the door. It creaked open, then swung shut. Rustling as he removed his coat, hung his keys on the hook. Slid off his shoes. Sighing. It was the same. It was the same everyday.
For a while, there wasn't much noise.
It wasn't clear if Gihun was just standing there in the doorway or if he’d moved to the living room. Sometimes he was quiet, too quiet and his footsteps were muffled by the carpet and he remained in limbo until he sat down somewhere and it creaked. And then something scraped —loud and on smooth tile. He was in the kitchen. He sat down.
The fridge stayed closed.
Then the chair scraped back again. Even louder this time, as though he was angry and then the carpeted steps thudded and creaked as he made his way upstairs.
He paused at the landing.
When Gihun walked in, Inho almost flinched. For a while, they just stared at each other. His face was grimy, somewhat unshaven. There were bruises under his eyes. His hair was awry, slightly crusted from sweat, some strands sticking to his temples. He was wearing their favourite shirt, some of the soft blue collar and the bottom edges of the rolled-up sleeves stained in grease. Another button was missing. Inho might have eaten it. He can no longer remember. His pants were also stained at the knees, some more around the faded hems. His boots were crusted in greyish sour mud. He smelled of machinery and exhaust, old tires. Cigarettes.
“Are you real?” Gihun asked simply.
Inho stared at him. His hands have gone numb. He couldn’t seem to move.
Gihun laughed. It was a soft, lifeless sound. He walked over to the nightstand and set one of his hands on the edge, leaning back on it. He started to remove his pants.
He held them in his hands for a moment and then tossed them to Inho. It landed crumpled at his feet.
“That’s all I have. Take it. You can take it all.”
The mild squarish bulge in the backpocket. His wallet. An edge of it peeked out. Inho looked back up at him.
“I have nothing in my bank account. You might think I’m lying, but I’m not.”
Inho took a step towards him, ignoring the pants.
Gihun raised his hands slowly, stepping back. Head ducked slightly, eyeing the carpet.
“I don’t want any trouble. Please, that’s all I have,” He cleared his throat, chin gesturing to the pants. “-if you want more, I’ll have to go into the suitcases in the attic, or I’ll have to call someone or—
“I love you.”
Gihun swallowed, staring at him.
“What?” He asked softly.
“I love you,” Inho repeated. Slowly he got down on both knees, raising his hands as well. He stared at the sparse uneven hairs along his rash-ridden legs, his beautiful, beautiful legs. “I know everything about you and I love you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been watching you. I’ve been watching you everyday.”
“Why?”
“I can’t stop. All I think about is you.”
Neither of them said anything for a while.
Gihun cleared his throat. “I don’t understand. Who are you? H-how…how did you even…?”
“That’s not important.”
“How is that not important?” He stared at him. “You’re in my home. You’re…you’re wearing my clothes. How long have you…?”
He backed away further, knocking more things to the floor. He stepped onto a letter opener and winced, kicking it away.
“D-don’t—
“-I’ll do anything you want,” Inho said. Suddenly he grabbed the letter opener from the carpet and pressed it hard against his own throat. Cold, hard metal. Sharp. “I’ll do it. I’ll do it if you want me to. I’ll die. For you, Seong-ahjussi. For you, I will. I’ll die right now —all you have to do is say the wo—
“-Whoa, whoa, hey, hold on,” Gihun cut in, his hands still raised. Slowly he made his way to him and then squatted down, his hands covering Inho’s trembling ones and trying to gently pry his fingers free from the object. “Let go of this. Come on. You’re still so young, you can’t possibly—
Inho let go immediately and grasped his hands tightly in his, bringing them to his lips.
“Your hands,” He said, throat shifting. Leaning his face into them, inhaling the smell of his anxious, ice-cold palms. Irish Spring soap. Motor oil. “-they’re so soft. They’re like the inside of the petals of roses. The thin layer of skin that forms when milk cools. Oh, god. I could just…” he exhaled shakily. He looked up at him. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this. How many nights I endured. Alone. I’ve dreamed of these hands. I taste them in my sleep, sometimes I think I…
“Some days I wake up,” he said. “-and I don’t know who I am. What I am. What I want. I feel like I’m stuck somewhere, caught. Like I’m losing myself. All of it. Everything.”
Gihun didn’t say anything.
“But then I saw you. On my computer,” Inho’s eyes brightened, the tips of his fingers hovering, then tracing softly, so softly over the other man’s hands. “You had a life. I had never seen anything like it before, you. All these years between us. And yet you were like me. Lonely. And sad. And lost and just getting by. I realized that things don’t change. They don’t. We can never run from what we are. I was so happy, did you know that? I stopped wanting to run. I just watched you. I watched you everyday. I felt like I was coming back to myself.
“I forget everything when I’m watching you,” he said, his lower lip trembling in awe. “I feel nothing except what I feel through you, whatever you do. Wherever you go. I am you. I am you. Don't you see? We have gotten so close there is no longer any separation. Everything else is an illusion. A sly trick of the mind or the world—
Again, there was only silence.
“-The lake,” he said, the brightness in his eyes already starting to fade. Still he went on. “We met at the lake. You were standing there —it was a greyish day, it seemed like it would rain —you were wearing a hat —one of those worn baseball caps that didn’t have a label and your shirt —the one you wore over the thinner one inside, it was grey too, grey mixed with blue, it had those stripes going up and down and sideways crosshatching, I can’t remember the name of the pattern now, but I remember everything, I promise you, I remember everything—
He dropped to the carpet. Still tasting blood in his mouth, shaking uncontrollably, flipping from side to side. In his hands, it had died in his hands, flipping softly, so softly in his palms. How could he have done it. So carelessly, mindlessly taking another life. He let it die on the grass. Not even the water where it came from, mere centimetres away. He kicked out and missed the wall, hitting the chair leg. Kicked out again. His arm hit the floor vent. Gradually his spasms weakened, then died out completely.
“You don’t remember,” Inho mumbled against his foot. “-any of it.”