—Do you want to die?
Gyu-ho was surprisingly bad at English but was great at East Asian languages like Mandarin or Japanese. I was the complete opposite of him and once got the lowest score on a Chinese character test in high school, an exam I had actually put a lot of effort into studying for. The teacher told the whole school about my result, a humiliation I carried with me for a long time. But I’d watched so many episodes of Friends, Will and Grace, and Sex and the City on repeat that my English was all right.
That evening, we spent a ridiculous amount of time choosing outfits for each other. The clothes in our backpacks were mostly shorts that doubled as swim trunks and cheap 6,000-won T-shirts from H&M, and we tried to find the least cheap-looking things we’d brought with us. Collars added a modicum of formality, so we ended up going with matching polo shirts, jeans, and sneakers, as not to show our wriggling toes.
The elevator took us to the thirtieth floor. I practically had to block my nose and pop my ears.
When the elevator doors opened, we were greeted by a party in full swing. Flawlessly pomaded men with pocket squares tucked into the breast pockets of their sharp suits, women with off-the-shoulder gowns and thick makeup . . . A DJ of indeterminate race was playing EDM beats. Cartier bracelets and Patek Philippe watches, Van Cleef & Arpels necklaces and Hermès shoes were drifting past us as we stood there, taking it all in. A hotel worker came up to us and took down our room number, told us it was a standing party, and encouraged us to enjoy ourselves at any spot on the roof. Gyu-ho went up to the DJ booth, which was almost two stories tall, and reverently examined the woofers and amps before I finally managed to drag him to a seat with a view of the city. We sat on a slippery leather sofa, our shoulders touching, and stared out at downtown Bangkok. I picked up a cocktail menu that had no prices listed and ordered a “motorcycle.” It was rimmed with a salty-sweet spice, which I licked off with my tongue, and which helped the alcohol go down easily—this great drink was free? We got a little too excited as we ordered everything on the drink menu, and the whiskey-based cocktails got us drunk fast. One drink tasted like grass, another was sweet, another bitter, another . . . Soon it didn’t matter what we were drinking, we simply looked at each other’s burning-red faces, touched our hot foreheads, licked the spices on the rims of our glasses, and kept drinking. As if we were going back to when we were children with ice cream. The sight of it was so funny, we kept laughing. Everyone else was laughing, too, not just us, and the drunker we got, the better things felt, and we held each other in the balmy night breeze, taking in the blurring Bangkok night lights, happy like we were five-year-olds again.
2.
After I broke up with Gyu-ho, I published a short story collection.
I’d been writing throughout my time with Gyu-ho. There I was every day, coming home determined to get some writing done, tossing off my socks before sitting my butt down in front of the computer. Gyu-ho would come back from his Chinese classes, pick up my crumpled socks and put them into the hamper, and sigh. There he was, holding out something sweet to eat to my irritated face. He always said nothing worked better to calm my nerves than something sugary. Then he would sit down on the bed with the stuffed Doraemon doll and say to it:
—My, my, my, what a grand artist we get to live with, am I right?
—You’ve ruined my day’s work.
I would complain as I lay down in bed next to him. His little finger rubbing away the frown between my eyebrows. The smell of water on his hand. I bit his finger, and Gyu-ho pretended it hurt. (Or maybe it actually did.) Whenever I failed to write what I’d wanted to write, or despaired that there were so many things in this world that seemed within reach but really weren’t, Gyu-ho bought me takeout dinners of Japanese curry or fried rice.
—Why aren’t you eating?
—Uh, Gyu-ho.
—Yeah?
—I . . . hate curry.
Gyu-ho died several times in my short stories.
He drank pesticide, hung himself, was run over, slit his wrists . . .
Gyu-ho became a straight man, a gay man, a woman, a child, a soldier . . . He became anything and everything a human being could possibly become before dying on the page, every time.
And as a dead person, he became the object of my love, my reminiscences, my dreams—always an object. In my memories, Gyu-ho is cold, perfectly frozen in time.
That is how my memories of him are preserved under glass, safe and pristine, forever apart from me.
?
Sometimes it feels as if everything was all my fault, and sometimes I think: it’s all so unfair.
That was the first thing I thought when I woke up in the morning. It was followed by all sorts of illogical, extemporaneous thoughts swirling up and consuming my time on this Earth. Was it before or after Gyu-ho had left me when these unwanted thoughts began to deluge me in my quiet moments? My watch said it was past noon. No longer the morning, in other words.
The night before, I’d gone to that same rooftop bar with Habibi. It was completely open this time, with a higher level that had been closed off before, and so we sat down at a table underneath the stars and shared a bottle of champagne. This time, I’d come prepared with a button-down shirt and a pair of linen trousers. I requested a blanket because of the chill. Habibi grinned at how I didn’t let a blanket around my shoulders make me put down my champagne flute. I couldn’t help grinning at him either, as our different backgrounds and ages left us with very little in common. I asked him about his life in the United States. (Elites love talking about that stuff, I’ve learned.) Habibi’s reply was shorter than I expected.
—It was brutal. And I was lonely.
—Really?
For that reason, he explained, he had ended up finishing his bachelor’s in three years and immediately found a job at a multinational investment bank. (He said it in that humble-bragging way that elites have.)
—Repressing my emotions while working in that bank gave me ulcers, headaches, and insomnia. Then the darkness came.
—What?
—Darkness. Literal darkness. My vision kept blacking out. The hospital said they could find nothing wrong with me. I spent two weeks alone at home. Once the lights had gone out in my life, I realized I knew nothing about myself, not a single thing. What I liked, what my room looked like, how I had lived so far, what I was supposed to do on a break, what I had to do to get the lights back on . . . This was the first time I didn’t have a clear and set path in life—I felt completely powerless.
—I see.
I could sympathize with him. Overwork and stress. I knew what they could do to someone. But this blackout situation seemed a little overdramatic, and I didn’t like the direction the conversation was going; I switched tracks to something lighter.
—Did you meet any guys there?