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“Sunghoon, it’s Kim Sunoo’s birthday today.”
“What?” Sunghoon is halfway through hair and makeup, seated in front of the mirror in his white leather chair that is beginning to flake at the corners, a half-finished cup of iced macchiato diluting itself in his hand, and he looks vaguely annoyed that the topic was even brought up.
“Your boyfriend, it’s his birthday. Is there something you want me to do, send flowers, a gift maybe?”
He has to admit Jiyeon’s a good assistant. Thank God for calendar reminders.
“Yeah, send him some flowers,” he answers, turning away to give some remark to his stylist about concealing the dark circles under his eyes before continuing. “There’s a florist a few blocks from here, isn’t there?”
“Yes, I’ll pick it up later during lunch. Any specifications on the type of flowers, the arrangement…”
“Pick whatever,” Sunghoon dismisses, rising from his seat and smoothing out the wrinkles in his dress pants. “He’ll be happy to just receive any in the first place.”
“Don’t you want to have dinner with him?” Jiyeon persists, following him to the other room where the lighting technicians are already setting up the backdrop for his first shoot of the day. “There’s this new Italian place that opened up not too far from here, if you want I can get you a table at-”
Sunghoon turns around, and his expression is mildly amused. “You have my entire schedule, Jiyeon. I have three shoots lined up for today, and we’re already behind time on the first one. Do you think I have time to go eat dinner with him?”
“...right.”
“Sorry to snap at you, it’s not your fault. I just haven’t got the time, Jiyeon. There’s always more things to do when I’m done with what I’m doing. Life is about give and take, anyway.”
“You can’t give and take on love, Sunghoon.”
"And I don't pay you to worry about my relationships,” he answers, a kind but firm message for her to back off, and Jiyeon gives up on the entire enterprise as she ushers him into the next room for his first shoot of the day.
─
Sunoo knows well enough by now. He can tell when someone has stopped caring, and by the time it’s gotten to that point, there’s nothing he can do about it anymore.
In their world, in the world of glamour and couture and date nights out at restaurants where the food came in spoon-sized portions worth a hundred dollars a bite, it was always about the gesture, never about the meaning.
What does it mean, exactly, when your boyfriend takes you out to your favourite rooftop restaurant, on the penthouse of a skyscraper overlooking the rest of the city, but barely bothers to open your messages and ask you how you’ve been? What does it mean when he spends late nights and early mornings commuting to countless photoshoots, insisting he needs to make a career and make more money, but you can’t even count on two hands how many months it’s been since he last bought you flowers? What does it mean when conversations that used to end with lingering promises to continue become terse, unanswered screams into the void?
What does it mean when every time Sunoo turns around and looks back, the person with the familiar hair and the familiar eyes and the familiar smile becomes more and more of a stranger?
He flips the screen of his phone up for just a second to check for any new messages. Many, but none from the only one he wants to hear from. He puts it back down.
He allows himself only a day of rumination. One day.
It has been decided. Kim Sunoo is going to kill himself. The only way forward now was down, and he’d be damned in hell if he didn’t make sure Park Sunghoon went down with him.
His flight to Paris leaves early next morning. Everything is already in place; the suicide letter in a wax-sealed envelope, an emptied bottle placed just on the edge of the bedside table, bedsheets crinkled, slept in, his phone on the nightstand, wallet on the kitchen island, shoes by the door, keys in the clear blown-glass bowl Sunghoon had brought back from Murano just a year ago. It was the perfect suicide, and Sunoo loved nothing more than he loved perfection.
He didn’t much mind leaving everything behind. His family already knew; it only gave them all the more reasons to visit Paris more often, like they’d always talked about but never got around to doing. He’d get a new phone when he landed, drop by Avenue de Champs-Elysees to pick up enough clothes to tide him over for the first week until he was properly settled in, and meet the person whose phone number and name was written neatly in his father’s ink-blue fountain pen in a corner of paper torn from the monogrammed loose-leaf sheets in his office. It is the only thing left from his old life he would carry with him on the journey, an obol for Charon, a ticket for a boat ride to the afterlife.
There would be a house ready for him, fully furnished, complete with an art gallery on the sheltered balcony and half an acre of unbroken meadow all set to be segmented and converted into an orchard for the cultivation of his flowers and anything else he might want to grow. His paints and half-finished canvases had to be left in his painting room back in his old penthouse apartment in Seoul, but that was no matter. Kim Sunoo had never lacked inspiration when it came to his art.
He would spend the first few weeks putting his new surroundings into paint, he thought, the bustle of city streets, the calmness of mornings, the stillness of midnights. When he was through with those, he would move on. Perhaps he would bring his canvas and brushes with him to the Louvre, spend the day absorbed in quiet appreciation of classic arts. The Basilica, too. The Notre-Dame Cathedral. And when he eventually became tired of newness, he would retreat back into the sanctuary of familiarity; the first seeds at the orchard would be sown, as he’d requested, by the time his flight touched down at Charles de Gaulle, in rows of tilled loam wet from the dew of early morning, in perfect time to bloom at the turn of the season. He would go back to painting his flowers, and he would be happy.
And I, stepping from this skin / Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces.
Kim Sunoo steps from the black car of Lethe, and his old life disappears behind him.
─
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice, Sunghoon-ssi.” She pulls the chair back with a silent, flawless movement, setting her purse down on the crushed indigo velvet next to her, pushing her sleek, pin-straight hair over her shoulder as she looks up. “I understand your schedule is busy, seeing as Seoul fashion week is nearly upon us.”
“It is alright,” he answers politely, offering a handshake. “Sunoo's sister, Kim Aeyoung-ssi, do I recall correctly?”
“Yes, you do.”
A waiter stops by with a tray, offering a selection of twenty different teas, and Sunghoon waits for them both to be served with their tea of choice, a bowlful of raw sugar-cubes and an exquisite iced biscuit before he continues speaking.
“So what is it, Aeyoung-ssi? Where’s Sunoo?”
She takes a poised, graceful sip from her cup of elderflower tea before setting it back down on its saucer. “I’m afraid I have some bad news, Sunghoon-ssi.”
“Bad news? Wha- what do you mean? Is he injured? Did he-”
“Kim Sunoo killed himself this morning.”
“No…”
“He was found lying still in his bed, weeping blood from his eyes, red as a spider lily.”
“No.”
“He had poisoned himself with a deadly toxin…”
“NO!”
“...and between his lips, petals still fresh, stem still green, cut with the precise, practised hand of a delicate artisan, a perfect bloom of nightshade.”
Aeyoung meets his eyes, as if she expects him to shout at her again, almost surprised when he doesn’t. She lets Sunghoon find momentary solace in his numb, glacial shock for the better part of a minute before she continues.
“He left a letter for you, Sunghoon,” she finishes, reaching into her sleek, marble-grey purse, handing over a cream envelope sealed with delicate wax. “There will not be a funeral. It is as he had asked.”
“As he has asked?” Sunghoon takes the envelope from her, looking up, eyes glimmering, hopeful, hopeless. “You knew he was going to die?”
“From the moment he was born, he was always going to die,” she answers, expression smooth, gaze steely, unreadable. “So are you. So is everyone.”
“That’s not what I mean, Aeyoung-ssi.”
“I know what you meant,” Aeyoung says, standing, her dress falling around her, smooth as silk. “I knew he was going to kill himself. Let me ask you this in return, Park Sunghoon; why didn’t you?”
─
Sunoo need not have worried about calling the number on the slip of paper in his jacket’s inner pocket; the man is waiting by the door when his cab pulls into the driveway of his new home; two storeys, tan stone and brick, gilt-framed windows and trellises crawling with apple blossom clematis. He hands the cab driver a folded stack of bills with a vague, generous murmur to keep the change, stepping out of the car and watching it disappear into the street, puffing grey and white.
“You must be the person I was supposed to meet,” he says, smiling, inclining his head. The man is young, barely into his early twenties, dark blonde hair, steel-blue eyes and angles, dressed in clean, smart casual. His features mark him as distinctly local, but when he speaks, Sunoo is pleasantly relieved to hear smooth, fluent Korean.
“How may I address you, sir?”
“My name is S-”
Sunoo cuts himself off and pauses to think.
Forget who you used to be, Kim Sunoo. Leave your past behind. This house will be your sanctuary, this city your haven, this lifetime your renewal.
This is rebirth, and I will forget myself if it means I can be born again.
“You may call me Aris.”
Aris. After Lazarus of Bethany, the man blessed by the divine with new life.
“Good afternoon, Aris. My name is Maxime, and I will be available to you at all hours of the day for any sort of assistance you should require.” The man smiles, and bows his head, handing over a set of keys on a simple silver keyring. “Welcome home.”
─
six years later,
The first commotion breaks through the morning peace in the orchard. Park Sunghoon stands at the gates, looking over green lawns and lush fields. He has waited six years to be here.
“Kim Sunoo.”
Sunoo turns and, through the white, gauze-curtain of lilies of the valley, he sees Park Sunghoon, for the millionth time since his birth, and the first time since his death.
“Sunghoon-ssi.”
“‘Sunghoon-ssi’?” the man in the blue-lapeled three-piece suit asks, standing between rows of budding blue irises, impassioned, unmoving. Neither of them speak again for a long, hanging moment.
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
“You’re supposed to be in Seoul,” Sunoo answers flippantly, turning back to his lilies, snipping away at withering buds. “I guess we both aren’t where we should be, are we?”
“Is this funny to you?”
“A little bit, yes.”
Sunghoon continues to stand there, eyes churning a billion moons, anger, confusion, relief, sorrow, yearning, yearning so deep it pulls at the very root of his existence, a parasite.
“You faked your death?”
“I wanted you to remember me, you half-hearted bottom feeder. Did it work?”
“Did it?” Sunghoon asks, indignant, accusatory. “I’m here now. Tell me, did it work?”
“The grounds will be open for viewing from Monday to Saturday,” Sunoo says, his tone a sentence of finality. “Please return during business hours. I’m afraid I have a lot to do.”
“Sunoo, don’t do this-”
“My name is Aris. I will see you again when the grounds are open for viewing.”
Maxime emerges from amongst grapevines less than two minutes later, slightly ruffled, his face an expression of mild worry. “I’m sorry, Aris. I was pruning the apple blossoms, I didn’t even know someone was here until I saw him leave.”
“It’s alright,” Sunoo says. “Do not worry about it. I believe we will see him again very soon.”
─
Sunoo is, to his own credit, not wrong.
Sunghoon returns to the orchard before noon the next day. He finds a young copper-haired man tending to a row of apple blossoms at the gates, and exchanges his name and intent of visit to receive directions to Sunoo. He finds him bent over a bed of trailing strawberry vines, the morning light glistening over his spun-gold hair, loosely pulled away from his face with a clear elastic band shimmering silver.
“Aris.”
Sunoo turns, and his expression is softer than it was the day before. “Good morning, Sunghoon. Welcome to my orchard.”
“Isn’t there somewhere we can sit and talk?” Sunghoon asks. “We haven’t seen each other in six years.”
“Has it been six years, now?” Sunoo smiles, artless. “I will ask Maxime to finish tending the strawberries for me. My strawberry runners are coming in exceptionally well this spring, I’ll have some served up along with fresh biscuits and cream if you’ll give me just a moment.”
Sunoo leads him over to a small gardenside table with two chairs, and Sunghoon shrugs his blazer off his shoulders to drape over the back of one of them.
“So, what brings you to Paris?” Sunoo asks, bringing out a plate of exquisitely iced sugar cookies and strawberries.
“I’ve got a couple of shoots lined up,” Sunghoon says, taking a bite of a lily-printed cookie. “They might have me back here come September, if they like my work, for Paris Fashion Week. It’ll be a big break, walking in an event of such a big scale.”
Sunoo smiles. “You were always very busy. I remember.”
“You remember?”
“Of course I do.”
Sunghoon looks out over the rest of the orchard. The beds of flowers and fruit are well taken care of; the blossoms vibrant, starbursts of colour amongst the browns and greens of earth. “So, is this what you do now? Horticulture?”
The other man bends an approving smile on him, assent.
“What happened to painting? You used to love it.”
“I still do,” Sunoo answers. “My canvases and paintings are back at my gallery. You are welcome to come over and see them, if you so wish.”
“Is this how it’s going to be? Letting me into your orchard, serving me strawberries and cream, inviting me to your art gallery, like we never meant anything to each other?” Sunghoon’s voice is strained, hurt spilling through his words like soil through open fingers. “Sunoo, talk to me . Why did you disappear?”
“I do it so it feels like hell,” Sunoo answers. He speaks unwillingly, fretfully, as if it pains him to think about it. To some extent, Sunghoon supposes it must. “I do it so it feels real.”
“So what feels real?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
Sunoo lapses back into brooding silence and Sunghoon can see something unrecognisable, something unstable warring in his cold eyes.
Minutes pass before he speaks again.
“It was the only way,” he says finally. “It was the only way I could think of to destroy you more than you destroyed me.”
There hangs a veil between Kim Sunoo and Park Sunghoon. It has always been there, as far back as Sunghoon remembers, and it always will be. Every once in a while, like the passing of a blood moon, a gust of wind comes by strong enough to pull the veil away, and it is in these transient, fleeting moments Sunoo becomes human again.
“It was the only way I could think of to destroy you more than you destroyed me.”
Moments must have endings, just as they do beginnings. The wind dissipates, the veil falls, and Sunoo is far away again, looking at him from across the atlantic, glacial eyes, glacial words, thoughts that never seem to be able to pass through the veil without becoming something else entirely.
The veil falls, Sunghoon loosens his death grip. Sunoo disappears, adrift in the place he has always been, a place where Sunghoon cannot follow, and he lets him go.
─
“I’m sorry for making you wait,” Sunoo greets politely. He’s dressed in a long flowing coat and a white shirt with sleeves that drape over his frame. Sunghoon thinks briefly of a ghost floating through castle halls, and he gets the vague impression Sunoo rarely leaves his home anymore. “I was a little lost. I had to call Maxime to ask for directions here.”
“I should think you’d be more familiar with these streets than I am,” Sunghoon answers, lighthearted. “After all, you’ve been here six years. I’ve barely been here six days.”
“I don’t go out a lot,” the younger man answers. “I keep to myself as much as possible. People are tiring to be around, after so many years of solitude. Maxime handles most of everything that requires contact with the outside world, and I roam as I wish, without worry.”
Sunghoon realises belatedly that he and Sunoo could never have had a future together. Sunoo would never be happy rushing from destination to destination, living life between breaths, sleepless nights in business class seats wishing for a home that was far behind them, cameras and photographers and lights that flashed so bright in your eyes you wondered afterwards if you would ever be able to see the world before you in the same light again. And likewise, Sunghoon would never have been able to live like this, a sparkle, a glimmer, a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it, walking through the world without touching the ground, living without ever really existing.
“You’ve changed.”
“It is a good change. I find it peaceful,” Sunoo answers. “I like peace. It is refreshing, after so many years of tumult.”
“But don’t you ever feel loneliness?”
“Other people are loneliness.”
Sunghoon laughs. “You’ve lost me, Aris.”
“Only when you know someone to the very core of them, their mind, their heart, their thoughts, will you find true companionship,” Sunoo says. The night breeze pulls at his golden hair, shimmering in the dimness of streetlamps, and Sunghoon thinks he has never seen anything more beautiful. “When you’re alone, you will always know your own mind. The more people there are, the more you don’t know. That is loneliness. I am not lonely.”
“What about Maxime?”
“I know him well. I enjoy his companionship.”
Sunghoon hesitates, as if he’s afraid to hear the answer to what he’s about to say, but he says it anyway.
“Then, what about me? Do you know me?”
Sunoo smiles, and it is resigned, a weary soldier returning half his weight. “More than I know myself.”
Neither of them say anything, and for a long while the only sound is the background noise of people passing in the night.
When Sunghoon finally speaks again, he is quiet, as if he is already admitting defeat.
“I don’t know you anymore. Maybe I never did.”
“I wish,” Sunoo answers, “with all my heart, that it would stay that way.”
An unreadable expression ghosts over Sunoo’s face, and Sunghoon knows he is long gone.
─
Sunghoon keeps finding himself back on Kim Sunoo’s doorstep.
He asks himself why, as he rounds the familiar corner, the ten-minute walk from his hotel muscle memory by now. He finds his answer relatively easily. Kim Sunoo is a quandary, a wonder, the mystery of all mysteries. In twenty-six years of life, he is one of the only things Sunghoon has failed to understand.
But I never really sought to understand him, he thinks. It’s a thought tinged with regret, even after all these years. No, I never did. I sought to destroy.
Everything unknown was a danger, and everything dangerous must be ruined, before it could ruin you. Everybody knew that. Sunghoon was no exception.
But maybe Kim Sunoo wasn’t the only danger. Maybe Sunghoon himself was a danger too, and he never knew it till it was much too late.
It’s too late for Sunoo.
Was it too late for Aris, too?
Sunghoon’s deliberation pulls to a stop. Kim Sunoo’s house looms before him, brick and stone, windows full of ghosts.
“Sunghoon.”
“Hello, Aris.”
Sunoo leads him onto the veranda. Easels of different sizes dot the wood-panelled deck, canvases bearing bright colour, works of varying degrees of completion sit drying in the late afternoon sun.
“I’m in the middle of painting. You could watch me, if you’d like.”
“I’d be happy to.”
The house itself is situated on a hill and overlooks the half acre of open fields Sunoo owns, the perfect scenery, a painter’s dream. But Sunoo has, he’s sure, painted this view enough times in the past six years that it’s lost its novelty by now.
Sunghoon searches his mind for conversation starters to fill the silence while Sunoo makes wide, gentle strokes with his pencil over a fresh canvas, but the younger man relieves him of the task.
“You might be thinking I’m about to paint the view from the deck, since I’m here,” Sunoo begins. “I’m not. I’m going to paint a flower.”
“A flower?”
“Yes. I’m going to paint one right now, entirely from memory. It’s like a game, really. Keeps my wits sharp. It’s easy to lose your mind when you’re alone too much.”
Sunoo goes silent as he begins, strokes of indigo blending into electric blue and cyan, yellow for stamens, orange for pollen, moss green to make a leaf, and Sunghoon lets him focus, content to watch him at work, watch the way the dappled light glints off his messy ponytail, watch his fingers grasp the paintbrush in just the right way to turn the most careless of strokes into the perfect splash of colour.
Sunoo finishes his work as the sun begins to set over the horizon and he offers to go on a walk, which Sunghoon accepts without hesitation. The stroll is leisurely, through the streets in an area that isn’t as densely populated as the central city, and they remain silent in each other’s company well into nightfall.
“Sunghoon.”
“Yes?”
It is the first time they have spoken since they left Sunoo’s estate.
“Do you ever feel like the things you remember aren’t really the way you remembered them?”
“I’m lost, Aris. Will you elaborate?”
His eyebrows furrow ever so slightly, as if he’s thinking hard. “Sometimes I think my memories aren’t real. I tried to forget many things, but now I’ve forgotten what I tried to forget, and what I wanted to remember. That’s why I paint from memory. It’s a test, really. Sometimes my memories don’t feel real. Sometimes I don’t feel real.”
Sunghoon doesn’t know how he should answer, and to Sunoo’s credit, he doesn’t seem to expect an answer either. He just keeps walking, through streets that look the same, cobblestone that never ends beneath his feet, and Sunghoon follows.
“Sometimes I remember how awful you were,” Sunoo continues, quiet. “Sometimes I only remember that you loved me.”
“I did love you,” Sunghoon says. “I left flowers at your grave for every year you were gone. Roses, carnations. Tulips, some years.”
A bitter smile twists its way onto Sunoo’s face. “Where were those flowers when I was alive?”
“Doesn’t it matter to you how much I cared?”
“You cared,” Sunoo spits, a mouthful of venom, sharp teeth, “too little, too late. Graveyards exist for the living, not the dead. And I don’t care if you left me flowers every hour of every day of every week of every goddamn year. Do you hear me? I. Don’t. Care. ”
Sunghoon doesn’t answer for a long time.
“I left you flowers.”
“It doesn’t matter. I was dead. You only bothered to love me when there was nothing left for you to love, and you know why? You’re a coward. You’re a pathetic, excuse-making, apathetic coward.”
“And I bet it drove you crazy, didn’t it? Knowing you cared more than I did? Knowing I could go days without thinking of you, when you could hardly last a night?”
Oh, Kim Sunoo, I wish you brought something out in me other than my worst.
“Admit it,” Sunghoon spits, and there is so much poison in his throat it scares even himself. “Admit that I’m the only person who could ever hurt you, if you’re not a coward like me.”
Sunoo looks back, blond hair drifting in the night breeze, and smiles, a checkmate. “That’s where you’re right,” he answers. “You are the only person who could ever hurt me more than I could hurt myself. And I am a coward.”
There it is. In two sentences Sunoo has lost him again, and Sunghoon is whirling into the dark water.
“I am a coward. You know who else was a coward?” Sunoo continues. “Cain. He slaughtered his brother out of his own selfishness, and then turned around and ran from the hand of death. That is cowardice. But that is also where we’re different.”
“Listen to me, Park Sunghoon. I am a warning, an omen. I am remembrance.”
The years fall away from them, and when Sunghoon looks up again, the man before him with blond falling over his shoulders disappears like a drop of snow in an ocean, and when the ripples clear all he can see is a boy, wrath thundering through empty eyes, begging with all his heart to be loved . In that moment, the boy is nineteen years old again, and he is so, so angry.
No, not angry. He is nineteen years old again, and he is broken. You broke him.
Sunghoon meets Sunoo’s eyes, as the last shatters of his heart fall adrift into the abyss.
“I am not afraid to die, Park Sunghoon. I will make you sorry you ever made me love you, if it’s the last thing I do.”
He disappears into the faceless crowd of the nighttime cityscape, and Park Sunghoon makes the abysmally late realisation that Kim Sunoo is, quite possibly, the most confusing person he has, in his twenty-six years, had the misfortune of loving, the enigma of enigmas, very thing sent by the divine powers to be his personal undoing.
Sunghoon has known Kim Sunoo for eleven years. Tonight he wonders if he has ever known him at all.
He returns to Sunoo’s doorstep before noon the next day.
─
Talking to Sunoo, Sunghoon realises, had always been difficult. He had always been the kind of person who’d had a talent for making someone feel as if they knew everything about him, when the truth was that they knew nothing about him. It was a talent, really, to pretend to be a book so open people could forget it had always been closed.
Don’t push me away now, Kim Sunoo. I know you always have.
Sunoo is, he thinks, a labyrinth. He is a corn maze with walls so high no ladder could reach the top, and Sunghoon has circled the same hopeless paths so many times he has forgotten what the world is like outside of it, and every path has led him back to the beginning, back to knowing nothing, back to trying to predict every thought of an existence that could never be predicted.
“I’m here now, Aris. I’m sorry. I always was.”
“I don’t want you to be sorry. It makes it hard to hate you as much as I should.”
“Won’t you at least give me a chance to try to make things right?”
“Things will not be right,” Sunoo answers, and he does not sound like a petulant child arguing for the sake of words. He is telling the truth.
“They will not be right. Not now, not ever. Kim Sunoo is dead, Sunghoon. Maybe I killed him, maybe you did, but I found his body on my front steps, I packed him up into a little box and dropped it down a bottomless well and in six years I have not thought of him. I prefer it this way.”
“But you’re alive now,” Sunghoon says. “If you’re alive, then the old you must be alive somewhere in there. You can’t forget your past, Aris. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“I’ve tried too,” Sunoo answers. His voice shakes, it is a whisper, and he is more vulnerable than he has ever been for as long as he can remember. “I’ve tried, Sunghoon. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I tend to my flowers and I think of sunshine and I forget that I’m broken.”
Sunghoon probes, cautious. “And what about other times?”
“Sometimes the memories come back to me…I try not to let them. It doesn’t always work.” Sunoo shakes his head, eyes closed, as if he is fighting a war inside his own mind. “Sometimes I remember, and it hurts me so deep I can barely breathe.”
Sunghoon lets Sunoo’s words sink in, and in that moment, he finally understands. His volatility, his turbulence. The way he was always tense, the way he seemed to smile one minute and fall back into brooding, mercurial silence the next.
Kim Sunoo was never volatile, not really. He has forgotten the things that hurt him, and sometimes he remembers.
It was, Sunghoon theorised, why Sunoo kept to himself so much. He’d said he found it peaceful. The truth was likely that being around other people was too much for him when he could barely handle being around himself. Sunghoon’s presence was, likely, making his tenuous grip on his mental state even worse.
He wondered what it was like being confused all the time, not knowing your past outside of little windows in time that opened only to bring you pain, so much pain.
“It must be terrifying.”
Sunghoon spends a long moment wondering if Sunoo would want Sunghoon to touch him. It is, he decides a moment later, the best he can do.
“I wish I could help you, Aris.”
“My name…”
“My name is Kim Sunoo.”
The blond-haired boy dissolves into his Sunghoon’s embrace. Tonight they are twenty years old again, and everything falls away.
Sunghoon leaves that night shortly after midnight. He promises to be back. Sunoo knows he will, but it will not be like this ever again.
He returns to his bedroom to retire for bed, shortly after he hears the front gates close. He is tired, and it is not a tiredness a good night of sleep can absolve. It is something deep, something he has spent six years running away from. It burrows into his bones, lingers in the marrow of his fragile existence, a reminder that ignoring the splinters of glass in his heart never really made them go away.
“I am dragging my body,” Sunoo says quietly, not looking away from the window. “Quietly, through the straw of boxcars.”
He reaches to turn out the bedside lamp and lies back in bed, and he dissolves white into the pale ivory bedsheets until the sun comes back up.
─
Methodical. He is methodical, lest he forget something. The sky is still dark when Kim Sunoo rises, night delaying its reluctant farewell to the city, and he dresses quietly, slow, practised motions, calm as the arriving morning.
His hands do not shake as they pick up the corked bottle of purple from the bedside table. They don’t shake as they open it, careful, precise movements, emptying its contents down his throat, a flash of bitterness, a bolt of lightning. They don’t shake as he sets it back down, lying back onto his pillow, folding into an embrace over his chest. He lays still, sinking between soft down, dissipating into a sheet of white, breath slowing, paralytic, paralytic.
The poison of a thousand deadly nightshades flit through his veins, dancing and glancing, obliterating everything it leaves in its wake, and the first tendrils of blood trickle from his eyes, a red spider lily blooming with the coming of dawn.
“There are days we live…as if death were nowhere in the background…” he begins slowly. Life drains from his body, warmth seeps from every orifice and he, content in passivity, stasis, has never felt more alive.
Kim Sunoo is so close to perfection he can taste it, a fresh canvas, an airplane ticket, sweet, sweet tranquillity, a nightshade between two lips.
“From joy…to joy to joy…”
“From wing to wing…”
“From blossom to blossom to impossible blossom…”
“...sweet impossible blossom.”
─
Maxime’s soft-booted footsteps are near inaudible in the fresh soil as he approaches, but Sunghoon doesn’t startle when he speaks aloud. The air is crisp, tinged with wetness, like every other spring morning.
“Sunghoon.” His voice wavers, as if he’s afraid of what he’s about to say. “Sunghoon-ssi, I’m afraid there’s bad news.”
Sunghoon is quiet, but his silence is acute. He knows; there is no earthly reason why he should, but he knows.
He is gone, he wants to say, I knew it when I woke up. I felt it, somewhere deep inside, somewhere I have not felt anything for a long, long time.
He thinks about saying it aloud. He, ultimately, doesn't. Maxime looks up at him, expression overcast, deep-blue eyes cloudy with mute sorrow, hands shaking just the slightest as he reaches up to push his dark-blonde hair back, still messy, uncombed in the early-morning light.
“Kim Sunoo killed himself this morning…”
“He was found lying still in his bed, weeping blood from his eyes, red as a spider lily…”
“He had poisoned himself with a deadly toxin…”
“...and between his lips, petals still fresh, stem still green, cut with the precise, practised hand of a delicate artisan…”
“...a perfect bloom of nightshade.”
─
Sunghoon keeps walking. He passes rows and rows of neatly-trimmed flowers, demarcated aisles of lily and peony and white camellia, petals still dripping with morning dew, the scent of lush grass and life seeping into his shoes. He keeps walking, unseeing, unhearing, till he reaches the bed at the very end of the orchard, bordering the tall grasses that surround the lake, and he reaches down into the earth, twisting precisely to pluck one single, perfect bloom from its stem. Sunghoon drops it into the pocket of his pressed slacks, reaching into his other one for the matchbox he knows is inside.
He thinks of Kim Sunoo, the unending maze he has traversed for one and ten years, the very thing he has run so far from but never ever really escaped. No, even when he was gone, he was still all around him, something bitter, something vengeful, the dead grasp of a corpse, vines of poison choking him so tight the flowers that withered in his mouth were his only sustenance.
He drops the match. The bed of nightshades begin to burn, and for the first time in six years, the labyrinth loosens its death grip on him.
Sunghoon smiles. It is the first time in six years he has taken a breath.
Goodbye, my nightshade.
Sunlight glints over the water’s surface, and the orchard ignites in glowing flames. Park Sunghoon steps from the black car of Lethe, and his old life disappears behind him.