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Chapter Text

There are twenty-seven versions of “Empire of Light,” by René Magritte, and of those, two are in New York City, in the United States, where the Panther had agreed to meet. “Why would I waste my time on a sixteen hour flight?” he'd said. Agreed. The flight  would have been a waste of time, if it weren't for the Guggenheim.

Is it the games, where this started? There was the appreciation of art before then; the occasional MMCA membership, maintained for a year then dropped for a while. Art museums were a priority when traveling, on those rare occasions before the worsening  financial factors barred that. But that’s different than this fixation on the European modernists, isn’t it? There’s a rich history of art in Korea. There’s no need for full galleries dedicated to art from the west. Well known, sure, but relegated to the glossy pages of the imported books filling the shelves of that modest studio apartment. Purchased after.

It was specifically because flying across the world and grovelling is below the station of the Front Man that this is what the Panther required to return, especially since Il-nam was too ill to make the flight. “Don't tell me you rode the subway in that thing,” he said, then snorted as he laughed. “You’ve seen mine, so don’t I deserve to see yours? If you’re half as pretty as that feisty piece of ass from the island, we could both leave happy.”

Magritte shone through the windows of that flight in blue skies and white clouds. He was in game room one, in the sky painted walls stretching towards the duller grey of the real sky. The corners converging, casting triangular shadows down the vibrant blue paint, edges softened by the clouds. The doll faced away, like so many of his portraits do, but that was a detail not thought of in the moment, but one processed through recurring dreams in the years since. 

“Regardless of if you maintain your patronage, the games will continue.” The English was practiced, with the voice modulation flattening any superfluous emotion. A briefcase sat by the window, overlooking Columbus Circle. “It is an inconvenience and nothing more if you wish to end your participation. This final invitation is only a formality.” 

It’s very lucky, to be in town when “Empire of Light” is on display. The MoMA only displays theirs once every ten years or so. That was another necessary stop, of course, even with the painting in storage, or wherever paintings that have been off view for a decade are kept. Perhaps lent to a wealthy donor, admired instead of collecting dust. Regardless, “The Persistence of Memory,” and “Starry Night” hang rooms away from each other. Meters, through the walls. There is always a crowd around “Starry Night.” With the right posture, you can walk through any mob with ease. Float right to the center, the leading point. Those hills and valleys of paint—what the glossy images in those imported books cannot convey is it’s more like bas relief than flat image; the thick deposits of oil paint like curled wood shavings, carved with a palette knife. Creation through subtraction. It’s mythologized, both the artist and the painting. Cited as proof true beauty is only achieved through suffering. Painted in an asylum, blamed on hallucinations from ingesting toxic paint, or, thought to be a product of his improving mental health. Regardless, he shot himself in the end. The bullet lodged near his heart, he lounged in bed, smoking in silence, until his time ran out.

“That first game is classic, of course,” the Panther said, “but that shit with the marbles? Whose bright idea was it to ban violence? What fun is it for me to sit around watching a bunch of lowlifes yabbering gibberish? Worse than that game with the shapes, cause at least that one had a different kind of show this year, eh?”

The dark, geometric mask hid any clenching of the jaw or twitch in the cheek. “Sir,” and the voice modulation held strong, pushing cold power into every carefully enunciated word, “do you wish to end your patronage of the games?”

Near “Persistence of Memory,” set into the wall in layers, illuminated through painted glass panels, is Dali’s “The Little Theater.” A surrealist recreation of childhood, through the abstraction of memory, through interpretation of memory, through the viewer’s interpretation of Dali’s artistic expression of his interpretation of hazy memory. Figures huddled in groups. Figures stretched out and exposed. Figures weaving through the disjointed pieces of set looming above them, racing perpendicular to the track. Flattened and featureless through distance, a bright scene watched through the window of a dark, ornate room. It's from the right side of the piece, stage left, that you can best see the objects draped before the proscenium, before the final pieces of painted glass. It's a fiction, beyond the curtains. The sky a painted sky, the distant mountains flattened against the same wall.

“Maybe I should have bet on the guy with the tongue, but he seemed like a pansy, and, heh, well, you saw how that ended. Crying like a little bitch. Even through the recording, with those tiny cameras, he looked pathetic.”

Of course, there are Magrittes in that gallery with the other surrealists. Standing close, as close as the gallery allows before a guard—almost always an elderly person in a suit with a kind smile on their face, honored to be surrounded by such beauty every day, honored to watch people, to experience the experience of experiencing art—will say, “Sir, please take a step back.” Standing that close, it only draws a deeper appreciation of those pristine, invisible brushstrokes. 

“Most of these animals have the survival instinct, especially if they make it that far. Feral things that attack when shaken, like they’re goddamn supposed to. Then there’s this fucking moron, with a fat ass and a yellow-belly. Of course none of us bet on him. If I had, I would have made out with more than just a concussion. But I thought the other guy, the blocky one, would’ve ripped him to shreds.”

“The Lovers” sits alone in the center of a floating wall. Disjointed in the center of the room, painted pink like the others. Not the same Baker-Miller pink as those sprawling hallways and Escherian stairs, but a soft, gentle mauve. The figures pressed against each other, a pink wall looming over the one in the suit, matching the linen of the other's shirt. The stormy blue of a sky stretches behind them, though capped by the oppressive beige of a ceiling. The cloth that covers their faces masks them from each other. Even in this moment of desperate attempts towards connection, towards intimacy, it wraps around his neck like a noose. It falls from the other's face, loose, draping, but clings tight to his, as the pink wall closes in on him, perhaps a suffocating protection from the storm that envelopes the subject of his desire. His point of connection to a possibility outside this building.

“It’s a yes or no question.” It's more attitude than is supposed to be directed at any of the VIPs. Inequity, slipping into the cracks of that painted fantasy world, where anyone has the chance to climb the economic ladder and free themselves from the shackles of poverty. But with 45.6 billion won, more earned through this job, some spent while some festers, bloating in investment accounts, what is that to someone like this? Rich in tens of billions of American dollars, funding the prize everyone else is stuck dying for? 45.6 billion won, and still it's necessary to bow to these animals who see themselves as the only true humans. “Do you wish to terminate your patronage of the games?”

It's the Guggenheim that had “Empire of Light” on view to the public, on loan from the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice for a surrealist exhibit. Ascending the winding upward spiral, past Ernst and Miro and Kahlo and Tanguy and Masson, past children in tactical strollers pushed by exhausted mothers and retired card holders who visit every week for something to do in their old age and a group of French tourists and tourists with unfamiliar American accents and art students sketching on benches and first dates going poorly and first dates going well and people staring at the art through their phone cameras and people studying brushstrokes from close enough to make the guards nervous, to the very top, the prize of the collection, the brilliant blue sky of opportunity not casting a single ray of light down on the nightscape below. 

The walls, blue skies with painted clouds, so vibrant they glowed even with the lights off, the playground below in shadows. The equipment, sculptures. No different in function than “La Grande Vitesse” by Alexander Caldur, the intermediate maquette seen at the Leeum Museum in Yongsan-gu ten years prior. Bright paint blackened by shadow against the artificial blue sky, not a ray of sunlight reaching the man on the floor. The guard who butchered losing players, who recruited another player to do the dirty work, to slice through skin under uniforms that matched his own. Whispered clues about the games, instructions to win, all in the pursuit of money.

Money. The guards are compensated, but that's not enough, is it? It's never enough until it's too much. A sickness, bleeding through this nightscape, everyone wanting a slice of the sky. The oppressive, suffocating sky. The overwhelming, boring, sky, excruciating in its vast emptiness. The clouds disintegrating with a single touch. The thing that's exciting about the sky is the view down. The darkness beneath, breathing, convulsing, begging for just a single ray of light, a blessing from another world, to be hurtled down at terminal velocity. 

“You're nothing without me,” the Panther said. “You need my money, or else you wouldn't be here! I have the right to make demands, after what YOU allowed to happen to me! And, what? The Host is still too good to show his fucking face to me? Or mask, whatever! This never happened with him, you know. He never let a fucking hippie piece of shit win without putting in the goddamn work. He would have never let some savage whore disguised as a waiter—”

I fired my gun with a steady hand.

In the nightscape, in “Empire of Light,” a single lamp shines between shuttered windows. Upstairs, a distance away, a warm glow seeps out from inside. There's a person in there, presumably. Living a normal life. Creating light. Warmth. Maybe sharing it, with family or friends. A lover with an obscured face. What would life be like, remaining there? Enduring the death of the whole world in one person, instead of four hundred and fifty-five again and again and again. The lights would turn off, then. The windows shuttered against the lamp. There comes a point where it is impossible to live in that cozy orange glow, but in the cold blue of the endless sky, it’s possible to keep afloat. 

There's another reason it fell to the responsibility of the Front Man to make the flight to the states. See, the funding is important. Courting another billionaire is difficult, with the shocking weight of the reveal, with the potential investigative spotlight in the event of a billionaire’s sudden death. Who funds the project is less important. The Panther, he's been involved since the beginning of these games. The type of old money at no risk of compromising the existence of a secret island through a series of drug induced tweets. That does not mean he is special, or that his life must be spared. It was difficult to even hold out that long. To give him a chance at all, after what he'd done. What he'd almost done. Those videos on Jun-ho’s phone, of him naked and whimpering, discovered in the bathroom, old flesh folded over itself in loose sheets, the cadaverous shape in the center of “Persistence of Memory...” It showed his time is up. From those videos to an online search, cross referencing his face against the portraits on the Forbes billionaires list, shot with a longer focal length, from a safer distance. Smoothed and polished, without the grime of a flushed, sweaty face pinched through a 24mm phone lens at close proximity.

It's not his name that matters. Why should he be allowed a name, when he doesn't even bother reading the files of the players? The discarded waste of the world, people who have had more meaning in their misery than his bland hedonism could ever achieve. He's number 207. His ranking by net worth on the Forbes list, 207. A thoroughly unremarkable number.

It’s easier, on the island, with a built in waste removal system. With employees tasked to make the system seamless. The isolation is constant, but it’s rare to be alone. The gun was not plan A. Jackson Pollock isn’t worth as much thought as the other modernists, but occasionally the splatters of blood bring him to mind. It’d take more layers to look like his work. Some splashing. There’s one at the MoMA, but not on the fifth floor with the more exciting pieces. No, but he’s a few rooms down from Warhol’s soup cans and Lichtenstein’s comic figures. Pop art is not as evocative as the surrealists, the expressionists, and the post-impressionists. The regurgitation of American consumerism cannot reach as deeply as the expression of dream. Abstract memory and interpretation of interpretation. What is the value in a recreation of childhood through the branded products involved, when instead, it could be conveyed through expression of how these symbols felt?

The trigger of the unregistered pistol was pulled through leather gloves. There were no fingerprints on the scene. Any loosened hair would cling to the interior of the hood. Every piece of skin covered by the uniform—a self imposed one, without the bright colors bleeding through the walls on the island, coating everyone else with a nauseating vibrance. Still, the angle was wrong for a suicide. Plan A was to inject him with fentanyl—a natural mishap that would be overlooked. The shattered gold Panther mask he wore, more to maintain his dignity than identity, caved inwards on his forehead as glittering shards blew alongside droplets of blood, fresh and vibrant like that wall of tomato soup. The blood, even after taking the time to stare, to take a few deep breaths and remember sitting in the “Water Lilies” room earlier that day, Monet’s dreamy impressionism spread across multiple canvases, enveloping the space... The blood stuck close to the scalp. Pooled within the remaining structures of the mask. 

Jun-ho’s phone was still in his pocket when Captain Park found him. When he woke up in the hospital, which the captain alerted me to as instructed, Jun-ho’s phone had already been accessed through the computer on the host’s floor. It was Il-nam’s. The whole floor was Il-nam’s, until the 33rd game when the Front Man took his place. He left after that, bored and ill. He watched the final round through an iPad on a hospital bed.

After that game, after shooting the last tether to my old life, destroying myself in the eyes of one of the last people I loved, a human being from the outside now infected with this, part of this surrealist nightmare because of me, where could I go? To that modest apartment, with my collection of imported books? To reread passages about Magritte, his mother’s suicide, his time in the army, life under German occupation, his communist beliefs, his counterfeit Picassos, then pick up a book on Picasso—maybe the one on his blue and rose periods, the pink and blue settling inside like a rock while waiting for the flashing lights of squad cars outside, for my brother to arrive with backup to take me in.

Designating others to the job of cleanup does not indicate a personal inability. The suites in that hotel have black hardwood floors, the staining less visible that way. Plastic, disposable gloves were slipped on over the leather ones and a roll of paper towels removed from the briefcase. Never pack a gun if you’re not prepared for the consequences of firing it. A wad of paper towel, a cloud abstracted into flat planes, was shoved into the back of the splintered golden mask. Other sheets spread on the floor, soaking without moving. With a gentle touch, more were patted along the white column, at the corner of the windowed wall behind him. “Memory” is a series of paintings by Magritte, each featuring a Greek bust, often on a windowsill, blood dripping from its brow. Inspired, likely, by “The Song of Love” by Giorgio de Chirico, a painting which drew Magritte to tears as a young man, inspiring much of his artistic career.

The phone wouldn’t power on, of course, but the files were recovered. Scrubbed through, those pathetic cries from a man forced to finally admit that he’s garbage. Disgusting trash soured through decades of rot. Worthless in all but money. Across from “Starry Night,” a projector plays “A Trip to the Moon,” the wide face oozing and grimacing. 

The cleanup was clinical. Each stained rag deposited in a sealed plastic bag, placed back inside the briefcase. Bleach on the white column. Isopropyl alcohol on the wooden floors. The body dragged to the bathtub. A bonesaw leaves too much residue, and there wasn’t the foresight to pack one anyway. Each joint had to be broken apart through brute force. Sometimes the bone would crack, puncturing the skin. Sometimes the skin stretched loose, misshapen. Sometimes it pulled apart, and ligaments clung together until they’d snap. It didn’t matter. The separation of bone was the first focus. A knife could handle the rest.

His notes were basic. Bullet points to jog memory, no meaningful elaboration. Before that, there were grocery lists. Passwords to remember. There were photos on his camera roll. Pictures of signs, of maps, of posters, of products he might want to buy. A photographic memory. Reaction images for texting. Screenshots of recipes. Stray cats. He rarely took photos of himself, but there was one of him smiling, holding the phone with one hand and doing a thumbs up with another. I wiped it all and destroyed the device.

With the bones snapped, it's easier to slice a cadaver into smaller pieces. Still, it was too big to fit in the briefcase. 207’s suitcase had to be removed from under the bed and emptied, its contents then replaced. The tub was simple to bleach. The indent from the bullet on the column remained the only evidence.

What is there to say? The indentations, the converging planes, angles twisted together in crowded visibility, is indicative of cubism? The gold plates of the panther mask, warped through the impact of the bullet, burying metal into the skull of 207, it's “Still Life with Liqueur Bottle” by Pablo Picasso, on view at the MoMA, taken in with quiet contemplation earlier that day? The vision is connected, the memory inseparable, but there comes a point where it just boils together into a rage, so deep it burns numb.

The designer bag full of body parts, sure that could be displayed at the Whitney downtown. The Brooklyn Museum. The New Museum. The lower priorities, on that brief business trip. Online catalogs skimmed and discarded. The suitcase zipped closed and taken down the stairs, mask placed in the briefcase alongside the stained coat, revealing a more nondescript shirt beneath. “Kkeutnassda,” into the phone, no other words necessary, while walking across Columbus Circle, down to the subway, briefcase and suitcase in hand. The mask and coat put back on in the empty hallway between 7th and 6th avenue, in time to meet the driver, who barely slowed while driving West on 14th street, then through the Holland tunnel, then to the private plane waiting in Teterboro. Sixteen more hours passed, with the closed window blocking out the Magritte skies, with the suitcase sitting on ice to delay the smell.

Chapter Text

There are twenty-seven versions of “Empire of Light,” by Rene Magritte, and of those, only six are ever on view to the general public. The version that just sold for, in equivalence, 61 billion won, it hadn’t been seen in over forty years. No showings, no photographs, locked away in the mansion of a record executive. The house in the nightscape sits atop a hill in the distance, large and alone with golden light pouring out of all the windows, out of the glass door. The buildings, in most versions of “Empire of Light,” don’t have doors. This one doesn’t have a streetlight. The grass glows gold, but only in close proximity to the house. The trees crowd around in shadow to its sides, except for one, which stands near the front of the frame, far out of reach of the light of the house or the shade of its brethren. At the very front of the frame is a rock, its flat face gazing up to the blue sky, the barest gleam of moonlight on its surface.

The motel had security cameras when Player 456 bought it, but he purchased more. The relief when he finally began spending his hard earned money dried to dust when he withdrew every single dollar at once. Before he did that, he bought a plane ticket. He was a number on a map, checked compulsively whenever the act of doing so would not be observed. Not that anyone around had the authority to say anything, but these people, they carve every sliver of information received into a weapon. His number stalled in a convenience store bathroom and faded away into the sewers where all signal was lost. Then, he emptied his bank account.

Descending the spiral at the Guggenheim those years ago was slower than the ascent. Each piece regarded carefully but briefly, the words on the placards registering as abstract symbols without active focus. It’s overwhelming, to visit multiple art museums in one day. To read the placards in English, one by one. Process and interpret, filtering perspective through perspective, over and over. While descending the spiral, a headache was building.

“Minotaur is Wounded” hung on the third floor that day. The figure, blue and anguished, was unfamiliar, decades past the end of his blue period. Picasso’s depression began around the time his friend killed himself after attempting murder. For years, everything he painted was blue. He isolated himself from his friends, everyone he knew, and instead turned his focus to poverty. A voyeuristic focus; fuel for his own misery instead of anything useful. He could, if he chose, have taken advantage of his success. Passed that fortune along to the people he observed instead of rendering them in sad blue brushstrokes, art not worth much at all to those who don’t view the world’s garbage as people.

In that first year, Player 456 stayed at shelters on the other side of the Jungnangcheon from where he had lived with his mother. Far enough to avoid everyone he knew, but not far enough to make a new start. The resemblance to the sad minotaur was closer then. Unshaven, his mustache hung over his top lip, his eyes distant and pulled into teardrop shapes. His facial posture had become that of a cartoon ghost, like the mask from Scream . Has he seen Scream? He hadn’t gone to the movies in the years since, so it's difficult to parse out his interests. Strange, to know so much about a man's life and next to nothing about his tastes.

It is more important to keep faces covered on the island than in the world, because in the world, anyone could be anything. A scarf is enough when there's only one person to avoid, someone on the other side of the Jungnangcheon from that shelter, which appeared blue in the dim light. It’s from an absence of color, rods painting the oranges and reds grey, rather than a presence of any real blue. That knowledge didn’t diminish the effect of seeing him curled in on himself under a thin blanket in the corner of the room, his hair long, rubbed into tangles against his pillow. He cries in his sleep. Quiet, slow tears, leaking out of him when his mind is too distant to be numb. His guilt is a useless, selfish emotion, doing nothing but deprive him and everyone else of his life. He woke up that next morning to a bigger breakfast than usual, thanks to an anonymous cash donation. “Blood money” spends the same as anything else.

The street lamp casts its own shadow. That is, in the version of “Empire of Light” that sold the previous year for, in equivalence, 115 billion won. Two symmetrical lines, shadows stretching up past the shutters, reaching towards the warm, glowing light of the second story windows. Cast through the metal bars, holding the glass in place, cradling the incandescent light inside. Shaded by the top of the structure, the two sources of light unable to meet. The sky stretches, white with clouds, above. 

He dyed his hair a bright rose color, before he withdrew all the money. He only withdrew part of it, then. Enough to pay off Player 218’s debt. Restart the search for Player 67’s mother. Keep Player 218’s mother and Player 67’s brother comfortable. For over a year after he won, they waited. They grieved. Miserable, before he finally allowed them comfort. If he ended the game the way he wanted, they could have both had 100 million won by then. His number on the map floated between a few different shelters while he was postponing his life. It wasn’t just his friends he hid from; it was his creditors. His purpose for entering the game in the first place, after he’d signed the rights to his body away. One of the last to be recruited, he’d signed that paper just in time to draw notice.

The number would move around on the map, wander aimlessly, then settle at a different shelter than the previous time, often days apart. He didn’t sleep much, but then there he’d lay, beard and sad eyes, haunted by dreams. Most of Picasso’s minotaurs were strong with inhuman faces, creatures born of his tryst with the surrealists, but that painting of a scared man at the Guggenheim, scars littering his skin, with figures in teal reaching out behind him... he’s pitiful. He apologizes in his sleep. It was around that time Picasso became acquainted with Jacques Lacan.

It wasn’t even a weekly basis, these trips to the mainland. Most of the time, it coincided with other business. Sure, it wasn’t necessary for the Front Man to make the trip in most cases. A phone call or a meeting on the island itself could have worked fine. In the Baker-Miller pink and rainbow sherbet halls. The sleek, dark, art-deco futurism of the host’s floor is better, the darkness a comfort, the bright pastels of the player areas burned behind the eyelids, the image flashing against the dark walls with every blink. It’s a showroom more than a home, even after taking full-time residence. There is no sense of ownership over the space, only in how the events are run. Sitting on the gold leather chair, whiskey in hand, watching people who previously felt no passion for life fight with everything they have to survive. It was a good reminder, looking at the discarded human garbage in the shelter.

The perception of art in a museum presupposes its importance. Even disregard of its importance inherits that it has importance to disregard. The experience, further, is filtered through language. The tools for expression of thought are limited to a finite set of sounds and characters, and even with the rearrangement of sound into new expressions, they're tied to the grammatical structures grilled in place since infancy. Reading Theory of Desire, rephrased through transcription, live from a lecture, translated from French to Korean, truth and objectivity sanded away even as the thought formed in Lacan’s mind within the structures of French, further as it's externalized, further as it's interpreted, translated, then interpreted again. In English, reading his influence on Magritte, and further, Magritte’s love of Hegel. Foucault's essay on Magritte. Grasping at meaning which cannot exist, only perception of meaning. What difference would it make, to decide it was all a dream?

He should have gotten on that plane. The phone was flat on the desk, next to the computer. It became harder to focus on vetting potential players as the time of his flight approached. Every little movement of the number across the airport, through security, to his terminal, to the bathroom, back to his terminal. Hours passed that morning, watching him get to the train on time. The week before, when he bought the ticket—the cheapest option he could manage—the relief was shocking in its intensity. A text came in from the recruiter, and the number stalled on the bridge. Mask on. Down the elevator to the control room in time to snatch the phone from a confused worker. To tell the others, if he calls again, transfer the call.

Van Gogh sliced into his left ear with a razor after an intense argument with a friend, whom he threatened earlier with that same razor. Number 456 stalled in that convenience store. He shaved his head soon after that, presumably. It was dark and about a centimeter long by the time he turned up again.

Picasso's rose period followed his blue period, marked by earthy tones and depictions of circus performers. He socialized again, painted with color again, so it's often viewed as an end to his depression. The performers look past each other, connection out of reach. Lonely amongst the crowds. Celebrated, but not seen as people. Only entertainment.

He slept in that pink motel, the windows pasted over in tacky film. Cameras in every room and hallway, with several around the perimeter. Out of sight from the building across the street—the closest vantage point without being spotted by his cameras—does he dream of Magritte skies? Do the clouds fall at his feet in cotton candy puddles, like “The Meaning of Night”? The day and night and day and night out of sync, out of touch, parallel worlds cycling around each other, thesis and antithesis, without synthesis. He hasn't even heard of Magritte, likely, muchless Hegel. What did he enjoy, back when he enjoyed anything at all? Other than gambling and drinking and all the ways he was wasting his life, beside his family and friends, what did he care about when he was alone?

“Night Windows” by Edward Hopper hung on the fifth floor of the MoMA during that trip, before returning in the years since to wherever “Empire of Light” sits, waiting out of view. The solitude of his buildings, of the people inside them, an implied silence despite the expectations of a cityscape, of a room full of people. It’s a personal emptiness, an unbreachable void between self and the other. Objet petit a. Those deep blues and vibrant reds, which only serve to emphasize the frigidity of the scene. Reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico’s streets, the artist who brought Magritte to tears with “Song of Love,” on the other side of the ocean from Hopper, with the other surrealists painting and smoking together with the philosophers. Through the window, in the painting, past the lone curtain blowing in the wind like a sheet ghost, a woman bends over, oblivious to the voyeur across the street, her short pink nightgown ready to expose her if she reaches any further. 

So he became a hobby. Studied, the way those art books were studied. Who can honestly judge, when I became his hobby in return? Searching for me with every waking moment, surviving off of takeout. The blood money cleaned with distance; paid to thugs who bought food for him, so he could separate it in his mind. Entitled to his own misery, as if it did anyone any good. He wouldn't keep track of anyone he cared about? Fine. Then the games could help instead. Would he have ever noticed his absence if he didn't watch Jung-bae die himself?

He was unremarkable, during the first game. Survived by pure luck. Someone as naive as him, but stronger, spared his life. The second game, that made him interesting. “Hegel’s Holiday” sold to a private collection for, in equivalence, 14.8 billion won, a few years before the world changed. Magritte, a fan of Hegel, thought the philosopher would find humor in the synthesis of two contrasting items—an umbrella, which repels water, and a glass, which contains water—into a single contradictory object. Not a true Hegelian Dialectic, without proper opposition between the two purposes, hence the holiday. Magritte painted hundreds of glasses, each with a vertical line of light, until the light became the curve of an umbrella’s handle, presented to him through his perception of a thing expelled from him instead of reliant on true introspection. But is there any measurable difference between interpretation of external and internal reality? When Descartes tried to prove anything existed beyond dream, all he could prove was his own consciousness. He took that to further ends I cannot follow. The imperfect mind cannot conceive of a perfect God, therefore, one must exist? But how can anyone qualify the idea of any God as perfect when factoring in the question of evil? Cruelty, rather, since evil is not a true state of being, while cruelty is the choice every human being makes when pushed. Almost every human being.

He survived. His warm saliva melted the bonds, allowed him to break through with the sewing needle, to free the umbrella, which should have killed him. Bent over on the sand, back arched, then onto his knees, his whole body moving in rhythm with his tongue... The memory calls to mind the famous Lautréamont simile, core to surrealist movement, rearranged, as it’s most often quoted: “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”

As Nietzsche suggested, the oldest instinct of man is that of survival. The distinction of good and evil, in the case of immediate relevance, should follow a classification of useful and harmful; however, when pushed, it is the “evil” who seem most useful for the survival of the group. The women and elderly, regardless of past kindness and values, are expelled when it comes to  games of life and death. Viewed as weaker than the stronger, more vicious personalities, thus, more expendable. The presence of tears does not negate the actions. The sacrifice of the few is necessary for the survival of the whole. He admitted it. He finally admitted it. Why, then, wasn’t it satisfying, to watch him cry? From Nietzsche, “If we make sacrifices in doing good or in doing ill, it does not alter the ultimate value of our actions; even if we stake our life to the cause.” He said this in the context of asserting all cruelty AND kindness enacted upon others is a way of wielding power over them. Pleasure is maintained through the constant act of transforming the external into an extension of self, put otherwise, though possession. The pitiful are an easy target to take control of, to fuel this sense of pleasure, which the naive can call love. The person who thinks himself a hero, it’s all egotism. A desire, to fill the void inherent to existence, through possession and power over the other. That’s what it means, to love thy neighbor. The natural extension of this love, the culmination, is a mutual obsession with possession of the other, and further, to be possessed by the other. The other. Autre, in French, thus, objet petit a, in Lacan’s Theory of Desire, divorcing the word from connotation to create a new meaning. An internal void which can never be filled, because the missing piece is external, and cannot cross between the two planes.

It was to take possession of me, wasn’t it, that he grabbed me, intent to reassure me, to help me breathe? Then, was it to take possession of him that I kicked the jegi and saved his life? That I shot my own guard? Even, that I spared his life. That I shot a man he’d already condemned. He stares directly into the camera, sitting on the stale sheets of the bed in the holding room. They were washed when they last needed to be. How many years ago was that?

Any footage from the island can be played on the screen that takes the entire wall, across from the gold leather chair, where I sit with my third glass of whiskey so far in the hours after Young-il’s death. It’s easy to fall back on old habits when it’s difficult to sleep. The grey coat and black leather gloves lay across the arm of the chair. I should shower. It’s been two days since the last one, the morning before the first game, but I can’t look away from him. Rendered in black and white through IR, the room around him black. The violet gleam of the camera, that’s enough to keep his focus steady. In Magritte’s portraits, he preferred to obscure the face. In looking at his face now, filtered through the wide lens camera, through the infrared processing, through monochrome, through the signal transmitted to the screen, from the screen to my eyes... The only difference between this and representation as a more abstract symbol is, the hatred in his eyes could not be properly conveyed without living, breathing realism. If only he’d sleep and let his conscious mind fade, with all its guards. It’d be easier to watch him cry. His grief would be mine too, wouldn’t it? For a lost version of myself.

Love, even as Nietzsche describes it, in order for it to mean anything at all, one must value the autre. It intersects with Hegel's struggle for recognition. Consciousness, as independent beings, is consummated through the recognition of that consciousness by another conscious being. This is what makes us feel special, human, but the recognition only carries value when it is from someone important. Importance. How is that evaluated? The symbols of power, of money? For some. How is the recognition consummated? Through transference of power, through handing me that last magazine? The one he risked his life to retrieve, the one that killed his teammates? No. He handed Young-il that magazine. But as a symbol, was Player 001 any more dishonest than the geometric mask? Than the reflection in the mirror now, with the blood stained white shirt still on, surrounded by this sleek black and gold art-deco showroom. The tastes of a dead man. Another betrayer who took a liking to Player 456. Fuck!!!

It's absurd, the way “The Lovers” by Magritte keeps circling the edges of my consciousness, appearing in flashes every time my thoughts get too Lacanian, every time I look at him too long. It’s unfair. The other figure in the painting, the one more exposed, it used to be her. When Magritte was fourteen years old, his mother drowned herself in the river. He refused to talk about it, later, so the story of the incident is inconsistent. Did he see her, dragged out of the water, the white fabric of her dress obscuring her face? This woman who should have loved him, who chose to die. Stubborn. Abstracted to a symbol in absence, the memory distorted into a shroud. He refused to acknowledge it. It crept into his work, as much as he denied psychoanalysis. The symbolic abstracted. The barrier between every individual’s perception an unbroachable chasm. Objet petit a, unable to be a possession of self, unable to fill that void, the impossibility of fulfillment through love. That's four glasses of whiskey, now. Normally, it’s kept to one a day. A ritual, while witnessing cruelty. Seeing people choose, again and again, the sacrifice of others is worth their personal benefit. That cruelty is the truth of human nature. It wasn’t my fault.

It was right after “Empire of Light” sold for the highest price any Magritte painting ever achieved that another sold for more. The two most expensive Magrittes in the world, copies of each other. Someone grasping for a sense of importance, to possess something established through financial precedent as important. More money than I've ever been worth, even after winning, even after years of this, more money than a thousand discarded lives are worth, just for one person to feel special. Desperate possession, to convince themself that value reflects their own importance. It was quiet, taking final watch in the player room. The golden light  of the piggy bank, just out of reach, made Gi-hun’s tears glisten. In that version of “Empire of Light” that sold for, in equivalence, 1,150 human lives, a shadowed tree stood between the warm glow of the second story windows and the captive flame of the street light, the windows nearby shuttered as it stood alone.

Chapter Text

Only Gi-hun’s eyes move when the light from the hallway stretches into the black room in a cold strip, splitting his face in two. He squints, his illuminated pupil contracts, but his mouth remains set in a thin line. He doesn't say anything, even as the light retreats, plunging the room into darkness once again.

“You should sleep.”

Gi-hun scoffs. The sheets rustle under him. “I knew you were watching,” he says. The venom dripping from his voice... Can he hear the sound of my breath catching from the force of it? The stutter of a heartbeat across the small, black room?

“You got me.” The modulation flattens the already dry words. “Am I supposed to be embarrassed?”

He's silent, but the glare cuts through me, even without any vision. With only the dim red light of the camera, the thinnest outline of him is visible. Within that silhouette, my mind carves through the inky black with a palette knife in sharp, impressionistic ridges.

“I'm surprised you haven't attacked me.” I walk away from the camera, towards the opposing wall, and feel around in the darkness.

“Is that why you're here?” His voice slips harsh and cold through gritted teeth.

“Maybe.” There’s the sound of a chair scooting across the tile floor. “Would it help?”

“Who?” He spits the word, the image of him surging in expressionistic scrawls of oil. He’s gotten better at thinking, after years of depriving himself. Stopped overloading his senses with frenzied hits of dopamine—he didn’t think he deserved that. Like the world’s shittiest monk. Alone with his thoughts, rebuilding his own shattered mind, piece by piece. I sit down.

“Why do you think I was watching you?”

The silence burgeons between us, overshadowing the image of him, blocking him from me, until his outline shifts. He looks away, the bed frame squeaking as he moves back. The paint smears with the movement, shifting oil on glass, blurred abstraction as the mental image rebuilds and adjusts.

“Do you understand how long I've been watching you? How much I've seen? I've watched you dedicate your life to me without learning a single thing. You'd never even seen my mask, until I let you. What version of me lives inside your mind? What did I look like to you, through that blindfold? Over the phone?”

“You think too highly of yourself,” he says, “A dog given control of the yard is still at the mercy of its owner.” 

“And what does that make you? You claim you're not a horse, but refuse to be human. Your mind is trapped underground, alone, never allowing yourself to leave the labyrinthian Escherian stairs.” The chair squeals against the floor, too eager, as I lean forward. “You know, Picasso became obsessed with the Minotaur, after his rose period.”

“You’re always referencing other shit instead of saying what you mean.” He probably rolls his eyes. “Does it make you feel good about yourself?”

“Do you actually want me to answer that?”

“Fuck, maybe. Sure. Yeah, if you'll tell me, then yeah. Tell me. What's your deal?”

“Hm,” and how can I even begin? “It helps, to make sense of things, to engage with older perspectives. The world, as I see it, is these games. Exposure to that truth, it changed everything. It did for you too, I know. My entire world ended nine years ago, just as yours did four years ago.” I swallow. The words feel foreign in my mouth after years of existing only in my mind. “I have always been honest with you, in the ways that matter. I sincerely hoped you could be happy.”

The only sound is his soft breathing, proof that he's alive. That he's really here.

“...you played.”

I inhale, the wavering force of it enough to register through the modulation.

“Are you familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche?” I ask.

“You're doing it again.”

“I’m not trying to.” I frown, looking away from his outline, to the red light of the camera, sending a signal to a system unable to receive it. “It is difficult to phrase my thoughts in terms of myself.” My attention snaps back to him with the slightest sound of the sheets, my gaze holding firm and silent in the darkness. “You called me their dog? I don't agree with that. I am not acting in service of their desires. They hate you, you know. One of them, his last words before I chopped his body into pieces, small enough to fit in his own designer luggage, was about how much he hated you.”

“You...”

“It wasn't in service of you, either. There were a multitude of factors. It was a strategic move. I watched, as you spoke with Il-nam. For all his cynical cruelty, he was naive. He created the games in an image of his childhood and never seemed to understand how goddamn surreal everything is.” Laughter, sharp and distorted, spills out of me. “God, how can I not, after watching blood splatter on sky painted walls, turn to art? Have you never seen ‘Empire of Light?’ No, of course you haven't. Have you seen The Exorcist? ” 

“Are you...” He moves again, and the bed frame creaks. The sound of fabric... he's nervous. He's fidgeting. “You asked how I saw you before,” he speaks slowly, as if the words have to fight their way out of him. Or, is he afraid of my reaction? Of me? “I imagined a hood, like the other workers, but all in black. No symbol on your mask. I had a hard time thinking of you as a person. My image of you... You were a shadow.”

He did know me.

“Do you...” and the words creep out of me without breath support, in shy desperation, “see me as human now? I don't mean whether you understand that I'm a human being, on a technical level, but do you recognize my humanity as instinctively as you do your own?”

The silence stretches on. He's breathing. He's alive. He's here. At last he says, “It'd be easier if I didn't.”

Then, the sound of my own breathing is louder than his, funneled from the hard shell of the mask directly to my ears, like waves crashing around me.

“Gi-hun... Do you want to kill me?”

The chair scrapes against the ground. I move towards the shape of him, curved in on myself, placing my hands on the bed, feeling for his hands. I hear his breathing more than see the position of his head. The shape of him, it’s made of sound. Felt through the displacement of the air between us, the energy buzzing under his skin.

“If you do, it'd be best to do it now. I made the camera feed loop. You'll have to use your hands, but that’s good. I don't want you to cheapen it, if you do it. The guns made it too easy for you. That was your first time killing someone directly, wasn’t it? Earlier tonight? But you got used to it. With the distance, the masks, it became easy to dehumanize them. Faster than you expected it would.” I grab his hands, moving with them to the clasps at the back of the mask, brushing his fingers against the mechanism as it clicks loose. “With me, I want you to feel it. I want the time to stretch on, infinite in a moment, while the life creeps out of me.” It’s his hand I’m pressing against the mask, then moving away, letting it fall to him. My voice is quiet, to not overwhelm the small pocket of air between us. “If you're going to kill me, I'd prefer you do it now, before those rich pieces of shit arrive.”

“I can smell the whiskey,” Gi-hun says. He inhales, slow and unsteady. “The version of you that lived in my mind was cold and emotionless. You didn't feel anything.”

“I've tried that,” I tell him. “Sometimes it works.”

“So then sometimes, what, you feel guilty? You want me to forgive you for killing my best fucking friend in order to sleep at night? Being a human being doesn't mean you get forgiven. I don't forgive you. You're just making me pity you. I won't do you any favors, by putting you down before your owners arrive. Is that what this is? Are you scared of what they'll do to you, because of what I did under your watch?”

His words pierce me like ice. My eyes dart around, to search his face where none is visible, a black chasm between us. “You don't get it.”

“Yeah, I don't!” Gi-hun sits up straighter, bringing his knees into himself, as far back as he can move on the bed. A barrier. “I'm trying to make sense of it, but you won't let me! You kill Young-il, you kill Jung-bae, you have me locked away here, and then, what? Stare at me through the security feed while drinking yourself stupid? Stumble in here asking me to kill you?” 

“I don't want you to kill me,” I say slowly, firmly, needing him to understand, “I want you to imagine killing me. Have you imagined it?”

“Every time I close my eyes,” and the dim outline of him turns away, the sound directed towards the camera instead.

“What do you dream of?” I pull my legs the rest of the way onto the bed behind me.  “Blue skies and flattened landscapes, pressing in from all sides? Suffocating? Whose blood is it that stains those walls? Is it mine? The losing players’? Your mother's?”

His breath is on my face again in the same moment his hands wrap around my throat, shaking, squeezing. “You piece of shit. You fucking vile... You...”

“I used to see my wife.” Only half the sounds can slip out, whistling and popping, but it makes Gi-hun's grip loosen. “She wasn't there, in the games. She wasn't there when I made it out either. I never watched her die. During the last moments of her life, I was busy watching others die. I held her embalmed hand, as everyone we knew looked on. I was... She smelled like chemicals. It wasn't her. Her face became obscured, in my dreams. A shroud. flowers. Then she had no face at all, a curved mask of hardened skin, blood sprayed across the Magritte skies. Even her face, back when I could remember what it looked like, when I could see it, only existed in my mind. A symbolic representation. An external projection of an internal void. Then it was her casket, gift wrapped, then nothing at all. Complete, suffocating, isolation. Then, there was you.”

His hands don't move from my throat, but they tremble against my skin. His thumbs rest on my collarbone, unable to maintain their previous position or move any further. 

“I dreamed about you too. Your shadow, I mean.” As the words leave him, he tenses, surprised by them. “You'd watch me as I slept. It was real life, but emptier. Darker. When I woke up, it was hard to tell what was real. You always... You'd... You'd give me their heads like you were giving me a gift.”

“You cry in your sleep,” I tell him. “This shouldn't be a surprise, after your friend told you the same thing.”

“You were...” and he's almost got it, “How many microphones are in that room?”

“I'm sure you're already aware that if you didn't abandon everyone you ever knew, you could have given him the money he needed yourself. Instead, you discarded him, just as the rest of the world had. All I did was save your life by making an example.”

It's easier to hear his breathing this close, without the mask, even when it's shallow and warbling. The words catch in his chest, heavy from guilt, until finally he asks, faint and brittle, “why don't you just kill me?”

“It's your hands around my throat, Gi-hun.” With the acknowledgement, his hands lower further, falling against me without exertion, settling past my shoulders. “I wish I hated you. No, I do hate you sometimes, and that doesn't help. I wish I felt entirely apathetic to you. It was easier, when I stopped feeling, but that couldn't last.”

“Who...” he trails off and his hands regain agency. Up to my jaw, my cheeks, then his thumb stalls over my lip. He stops breathing.

His face is vivid in my mind, the same shocked expression he had that freezing night all those years ago. A golden warmth on his skin against the cold, dull colors of the night. Even if the room wasn't so empty, all attention would be drawn to him, the impressionistic vibrancy of him, while the surrounding world faded into abstract implication in negative space. The horrified gaping of his mouth, the sheen of heartbreak in his eyes... When viewing an oil painting in a museum, often you have to step to the side to take it in, without the glare from looking at it head on.

Without much air, barely audible above my own breathing, he asks, “who are you?”

“It was for selfish reasons that I honored your request.” I start at a ponderous pace, even though I know he won't understand this confession. “He saw something in you up close I couldn't see from a distance. As I told you, I didn't expect you to finish your race. He did, because he knew you. It's rare for anyone to surprise me. Every year, as I watch the games, it echoes what I already know as the truth of human nature. Do you know what Nietzsche... I shouldn't ask. I know you don't. How about a different concept, then. Have you seen Saw ?”

“Horror movies make me queasy... I don't... Young-il...”

“That's not my name.”

“Ok, fine! Then start with that!” and it's at this point he removes his hands from my skin. “Stop talking about movies and all this.. this... bullshit and just tell me your fucking name!”

“I didn't mean to reveal myself to you. I didn't mean for anything to happen like this. I...” I can't look at him, at the hazy dapples of color in my mind’s eye implying him. Without his touch, the expanse between us is rendered infinite. “There's a level of power I wield here, because the previous host selected me. Because I have proven I can do what needs to be done. But the sorts of people driven to this work... You see what happens to the players. The idea of earning money at the expense of someone's life changes them... and they get greedy. If they see me slip up, even a little, we are both dead. Do you understand?”

“Well, maybe we should be! Maybe we died in those games, and everything after is unnatural.” With those words, I see him again.

“Like Bride of Frankenstein ... I knew you'd understand. I just had to make you understand. I had to show you,” and I'm grabbing at him, the way he grabbed at me. “See? You see everything I've done for you?”

Then I'm on the floor. A pained sound rips from Gi-hun's throat from the force of the shove, despite his best efforts to hide his pain. The spots of color floating in the black room barely register as I scramble back towards him, to grab him again, to say, “They shot you.” This shouldn’t be a surprise. It didn’t impact his movement much before, but the blood was much darker on his left sleeve than anywhere else.

“ Your guards shot me,” he says, and I can hear the scowl in his voice.

 “And I shot them,” I tell him, climbing back onto the bed, needing him to remember, to hear his friend's voice, to picture my face. “I should have grabbed my kit. I can find one now, but I'd have to leave you alone in here again, and I won't be able to...” I swallow, glancing up towards the dim red light. Would a desperate plea for him to stay alive register as a challenge to do the opposite? I start shrugging my coat off and tell him, “take your jacket off,” as he recoils from me. “Now.”

He yelps, and the sheets surge into me as he scrambles backwards. I'm ripping a strip off my player shirt as I say, “calm down,” and the mattress creaks, adjusting to his sudden absence. I tell him, “You need pressure on your wound. You can't afford more blood loss. That's why the pain has gotten worse.”

He laughs, cold and empty. I grab him, following the sound, moving to my feet quickly enough to make my head spin as I shove him against the wall. He groans from the impact, and I tell him, “this is not optional.” Pressing my body weight against him, pulling his jacket off his shoulders, I'm asking, “why do you have such little regard for your own survival? Especially since you care sooo much for everyone who's died so you can live.” Throwing the jacket behind me, arm braced against his chest, I tell him he's, “so ungrateful.”

He's shaking, but no words come out, just half choked laughs. He doesn't attempt any bigger movement. It's when he finally says, “fuck you,” that I realize he's crying. Not full sobs, but enough to make his voice snag.

The hand not braced against his chest moves down his arm, feeling for the edges of his wound in the darkness. He'd kept his jacket on the whole game. Even grabbing him to celebrate during the six legged race, or when he reached out to offer or seek comfort from his trusted friend... it was never skin to skin. Feeling the hairs on his arm, the follicles standing on end, the shape of muscle underneath, the movement of blood just below the surface... When was the last time I'd touched the skin of anyone still living?

Then, there's the blood. It clings to the hairs of his arm, in varying states of dryness. Solid crumbs of it in warm liquid, thick and sticky. The air settles like oil in my lungs, my head buzzing. I swallow, and hold my fingers against his arm, marking my place, as I reach down with my free hand, ripping through the last fibers holding the torn strip to the rest of the shirt. My eyes are closed, as I hold it against the opposite side of his arm, then pull it tight as I wrap it around. Once, tighter, twice, and I lose track, until finally I'm tucking in the end. I open my eyes again, and look, unseeing, into where his face should be. I feel his breath against my nose.

“It's going to get infected,” I tell him. “Sweat contains bacteria, and after two days in the games—”

“You were wearing your player shirt?” He grabs me, pushing me away, but not far, not letting go. With the pain in his voice, there's the implicit “when you shot Jung-bae?”

“I pulled the coat on over my clothes. There wasn't time for much else.” 

“I hate you,” Gi-hun says, clutching at the shirt. “I hated the idea of you, but now...”

“If you kill me, they'll kill you next.” I'm speaking softly, moving back to him, leaning my head against him. His heartbeat hammers, jugular thrumming against my forehead, but I don't have the context to draw conclusions. It's an oversight, really, that I don't know his resting heart rate. 

“That's not why I don't want to kill you,” he says, and then, I’m the one laughing.

“What makes someone human enough to deserve life, to you?” I try to look at him, and he’s in melancholic Edward Hopper teals, the endless darkness rubbed away to reveal the texture of the canvas. “Is it tragedy? Proximity? Do I deserve to live because I was once like you? Do the guards deserve to die because they didn’t suffer enough before turning to cruelty?”

“You’re sick,” he says, “I don’t think you’re... I think...” He pauses. He’s tense against me, but doesn’t push me away. “Your actions make sense to you because you read books and watch movies to make sense of it, but you wouldn’t be...” He doesn't sound like he's crying anymore, but he's still shaking. “I don’t think you’d be this desperate to make sense of it if you didn’t still care about people. You want to think this is just a story, right? Like, some kind of fucked up social experiment?” He takes a deep breath. “I think you might be insane.”

“Insane?” I ask, pulling away, and he sighs.

“I don’t know, like, you’re not exactly here. I mean... that shit about blue skies? Don’t you think you sound insane? You talked about how you can’t trust anyone here... so when’s the last time you actually talked to somebody as a person?”

The bed creaks. I had to sit down. This isn't... but how was it supposed to go? What ideal outcome had formed in my mind, vivid enough to get me down the elevator, pressing some buttons in the control room to manipulate the camera feed—in an impression of a sober and responsible boss—down the hallways, up the stairs, and into the tiny room where he was trapped with only a bed and a chair and a bucket? I say, “I used to see my family,” which is more than I should tell him. “Before my brother found out the truth and I had to pull back.”

“Brother...” Gi-hun mumbles it to himself. I lay back, unable to look at the idea of him. “Oh,” he says. “I thought he might be lying about what he knew... He looked away, when he told me he didn’t see under the mask. Wait, the tracker, did he—”

“No! No, don’t blame him,” and the force of the defense brings me half upright. Losing momentum, I fall back, mumbling, “You know that I’ve been watching both of you for years.”

There's the sound of one footstep forward, then a pause before the mattress dips under him as he sits at the edge of the bed. “You've let this place destroy you,” he says to the wall, his voice bouncing back to me.

“Nietzsche talked about self as a continuously changing entity, overcoming itself in the battle for more power and influence.” The words run together. “It’s a little more diachronic than the pure synchronic approach in Buddhism, but in nine years... I think Nietzsche would agree the person who played is distinct from who I am now.” 

He doesn't stop me, doesn't say anything at all, so I go on. “Before I read much, his idea of eternal return felt deterministic. Like it meant I'm trapped in this moment, this place, returning every year. It's the opposite. It's this idea that, instead of worrying about cosmic importance and succumbing to the gloom of nihilism, we must create an internal continuity. Think of each moment as infinite, every action one that can be repeated. If I've done this once, it means I can do it again, or I should not have done it at all.”

I hear him before I feel him, leaning back on the bed next to me, overlapping me. “So you do want forgiveness,” he says. “That's why you're here.”

“I didn't think about Hegel much until I met you,” I tell him. He doesn't understand the confession. I bite the inside of my lip. I’m shaking, a realization achieved through contrast. He's still. I adjust myself, to give him more room without separating, feeling his makeshift bandage against my arm. “Magritte was a fan of Hegel, but even translated, it gave me a headache to read him. I processed his ideas through art instead of words. You've not seen ‘Empire of Light,’ you don't...” I swallow. “Get on a plane with me.” I resent the desperation in my voice. “It doesn't matter where we go. Somewhere far from here... Somewhere with museums.”

“In-ho...” he says, and there's a burning feeling behind my eyes, a tightness in my chest. It'd been years since I last heard my own name. “I have to stop the games. You can either help me or kill me.”

“What do you think will happen?” This is pathetic. “If I help you, if we kill the VIPs, what then? If we called my brother, gave him the coordinates so he could bring those mercenaries here, do you still honestly think that would do any good? Do you think these people would thank you, if you sent them on a boat back to get killed by their creditors instead of by these games? Or to die by starvation, hypothermia, poverty instead of a clean shot to the head? If you were actually concerned with saving these people, you'd prevent them from getting here in the first place. When you stole that card to call me at the airport... Do you think you saved that man? Do you think of what happened to him next, wonder if he survived longer than any of that year's players? You're so goddamn naive. I can't stand you.

“You think I'm insane for the way I've made sense of this? I can justify my beliefs. My logic is consistent. I've thought everything through, questioned and defended, until I'm certain. You can criticize my actions, think of me as evil, but all you have is a childish view of human morality you cling to as justification for your vindictiveness. That's what it is! That's what all of this is about! Vengeance! You think you don't want anyone else to suffer through the thing that ruined your life, not realizing, it was the strike that ruined your life. In the last thirty-six years, most winners have been grateful!” 

“Thirty-six years...” he repeats, only audible through proximity. 

“What do you want, Gi-hun?” I ask, turning to him. “You've gotten smarter, in the years since. You've thought about this. You have to know torturing yourself is a selfish, useless impulse. For someone so opposed to violence, you've let it define you. What, you want to help your fellow man, so you collect black market weapons and set up a gun range in your home? Your desires are hollow. You don't know how to figure out what you really want because you're so focused on your emotions, you're not willing to engage with logic.”

“I just want it to be over,” he says. “I know I can't fix everything, I know the world is cruel, but this specific... This does not have to happen, and I can't...” He takes a ragged breath. “You're stuck here too.” He turns his head towards me, leaving his injured arm flat. “You're stuck here too, and it's not because of logic, not because of.. Nichae? or any of the books you read. It's for the same reasons I am.”

It takes immense concentration to breathe. To blink. 

“In-ho... What do you want? Because I know it's not this.”

I think about it. It's more telling than anything else, how seriously I take his question. “Reason,” I answer, finally.

“Reason,” he repeats. I nod. Maybe he can sense it. “I don't want to forgive you,” he says.

“I haven't asked you to.” I grab onto his shirt, fist tight around the thin fabric. “I'm not sorry. Understand, despite the... this... moment of weakness... this isn't remorse. I don't think you're right.”

“Then what do you want from me?” He speaks so quietly, the words brushing across my cheeks. My mouth opens. I’m staring into where his eyes should be, even as I'm taken by spastic blinking.

“This.” I'm breathing in his air, breathing out into him, feeling my own breath reflect back to me, mixing with his. “I think this is what I needed.” He's a warmth against the cold, negative space. He's painted in blue. The blue is scrubbed away and he's carved from globs of rose paint. He's gold, he's real, the mental image rippling through striking contradictions of style and color. The air is too thick. I'm inhaling paint, unable to close my mouth, inhaling him, suddenly remembering neither of us have brushed our teeth since the first round, but the thought is overpowered as soon as it occurs by the force of surging impressionistic colors.

“Then you have a choice to make.” He breathes it more than speaks it. “You can help me end this, and then... we can figure out what comes next. Maybe I can move on after ending this. Maybe you're right and I need to think bigger. Maybe you're...” The words die in his throat. “Now that even he's...” The words shatter, and he has to take deep breaths, calm himself, reorient. “Have you played any of the Metal Gear games?”

It’s like a cold wind blows between us. “Explain it to me.”

“I don’t know, I played so long ago, it was before I even met my ex-wife... I just think Solid Snake, after... everything that happened to him, wouldn’t be able to get close with anyone who hadn’t been exploited by the same systems. Then he meets Otacon, who helped make this big weapon he's trying to destroy, or stop or something, but meeting Snake makes Otacon realize he shouldn’t have done that, and so he helps Snake fight the bad guys and they...” He breathes sharply out of his nose, and then, I realize he’s laughing. “God, what am I saying? How do you explain your references in a way that sounds relevant?!”

“No, I think I get what you mean,” I tell him. “So, they became... friends after that?”

“Yeah, they got really close.” He’s talking quickly, directed towards the ceiling. “But Otacon didn’t know what he was doing and felt really bad about it, so it was easy for Snake to forgive him.”

“I assume there’s a subtext you’re not explaining,” and maybe he hears the smile in my voice as I say this. “If all you wanted to tell me was, you think it’s possible for us to become friends due to our shared experiences, as long as I help your mission, you would have said that.”

“It’s less that I think I could be friends with you and more I think...” His arm moves, his hands fidgeting together. “Now... I couldn’t with anyone else.”

“I gathered that from what you were saying before bringing up this game, but your point seemed to change as you talked about it. It did let you bring up a subject you couldn't otherwise, didn't it?”

“You're calling attention to it so directly! Now it's harder for me to say anything about the weird vibe Snake and Otacon had, so doing your trick won't even work!”

“Weird vibe,” I repeat.

“Ugh, this is embarrassing,” he grumbles, “and I still hate you, to be clear.”

“Of course.” My fist on his shirt loosens. “Let me try. There's this painting by René Magritte where two figures with cloths over their faces attempt to find closeness, but there's this barrier between them and they cannot see each other, only darkness, and cannot touch, only rub their masks against one another in an approximation of intimacy. Lacan framed desire as a longing for something missing in oneself. Nietzsche argued we desire to take possession of others to make them into part of ourselves, and calls this love. Hegel thought every conscious being desires to be seen as a conscious being by another whose consciousness he recognizes in return, that we’re drawn to opposition and contradiction because that is necessary for self actualization and the progression of the species. Nietzsche also said, there is a wide plank between us, and we are afraid of feeling. We recoil from any tenderness, unless it is undercut with a means of distancing ourselves or killing that tension. Jokes, insults... It would be easier for me to tell you, and for you to accept, that I care for you so intensely, if I also tell you you're a fool who wants to feel like a hero while only causing more harm. How’s that?”

The silence oozes into every crevice of the room before he starts attempting to speak. Then it’s half syllables, sliced off as he doubts himself, then he’s quiet again, before his voice slips out, with fragile hope. “...would you change for me?”

I let go of him and turn away, staring at the idea of the ceiling. “You realize what you’re asking of me, right? If I, what, help you blow up this island? Kill the VIPs? We’d both be dead, and for what? The games would be rebuilt. I’ll...” I stare into the soft, red glow of the camera. “But I am tired of this. I don’t know if I can exist beyond this, if I am still capable of being a person after all this time. I think...” There's Jun-ho’s face in my mind, the blurry photograph from his destroyed phone. The memory of him, our guns pointed at each other, it's not abstract. The sky, a real sky, with its dull clouds. The last time we saw each other, right around the last time Gi-hun saw his own family. “You know why you should have gotten on that plane? Because it would have proved to me that it’s possible to leave.”

“We could leave if there was nothing left,” he says, directly into my ear, his hair brushing against mine. I feel it in my lower back, catching myself before I make a noise. “Come on,” he says, “maybe it doesn’t have to be rational. Maybe blowing it all up is enough.” I can’t take it. I can’t fucking take it. I turn so fast there’s a hard smack before my lips find his.

It’s not tactful, the way I force myself against him so hard my teeth puncture the inside of my lip. He moans as his injured arm spasms under me. One leg shoved between his, pressing every surface of myself into him, I brace my knee on the bed behind his thigh, lifting myself against him until I’m half on top of him, to his other side. My mouth never leaves his. It can’t, because if this stops for even a moment, it might never happen again.

His injured arm, now freed, wraps around me, rabid, clawing at the number on the back of my shirt, the fabric swirling around every motion of his fingers. Self must be imagined as a collection of physical sensations. No, it shouldn’t be imagined at all. The symbolic should be destroyed. Bits of his scalp gum together under my nails. His hair shouldn’t be this soft. Thought should be eradicated in favor of the real. No filtering through language, through image, through art. Pulling at him, pushing against him, to degrade the separation between us as distinct beings. Absorb him as an extension of myself, possess him, and in return, be possessed by him. Shredding the masks, the white shrouds, grabbing under his shirt so tightly the texture of his muscles, of his veins, is as vivid as his skin. The puckered, hardened flesh, just below his ribs, forces the image of him, soaked in the rain, writhing on the ground as blood soaked through his shirt. The ferocity with which he fought, before his anger subsided to forgiveness and he gave it up. Then, to grief, his master.

I press my thumb against it, so hard I can almost feel the rest of my fingers through his back, the dead tissue chafing against his nerves, until I’m tasting an echo of his past wailing, devouring it, while he clutches me tighter, the fabric of the shirt tearing in one hand, while his other hand grips the back of my head, fingers knotting into my hair. He pulls himself into me, matching my forceful intensity. Stinging streams down my back as his short nails dig into me. I want him to destroy me, to destroy everything in this whole damned world. From his scar, I feel down, further, to the band of his pants.

He turns his head, and I kiss the skin of his cheek, trailing my mouth down to his neck as he says, “wait.” My teeth scraping against his neck, pulling skin between them as I begin to suck, and he says, “not yet.” His hand, my blood under his nails, grabs mine, entwines with it, pulling it to the bed beside us as he says, “you don’t get to do that, until I know you’re serious.”

I murmur into his neck, “what about this implies I’m joking?”

“In-ho,” he says, pulling my head back through his grip in my hair, trying to look at me, forgetting he can’t see me. “If we do this, it’s after you help me destroy the island.”

I groan. I shift against his thigh, still between my legs. “There won’t be an after. Please, stop depriving yourself in service of some—”

“This isn’t me depriving myself,” he says, scooting backwards, pulling me with him as he sits up. He lets go of my hair, shifting to cradle my face instead. I lean into his touch automatically. “This is... I won’t let you use me. I am drawing this line, here and now, if you want my forgiveness, if you want me to love you , you—” and he chokes on the intensity of what he said, finger stalling over the old scar behind my ear.

“You... think you could?” I ask, and the vulnerability in my voice sickens me. He sickens me, but then he says, “if you earn it,” and it feels like my organs are being flung around the center of the mingle room.

“So,” and I strain my voice out, as neutral as I can manage at this point, “if I help you destroy everything, and actually keep you alive, you—”

“Yes,” he says, interrupting me, not wanting to confront the specifics of what he’s agreeing to, as much as I don’t want to voice it explicitly myself, to constrain something this real to the symbolic.

I fall into him, and he wraps his arms around me, gentler this time, and pulls me down with him so we lay facing each other, his injury elevated. My shirt is in shreds. The outer layers of our uniforms lay discarded on the floor. It can’t be more than a few hours before the first round of wakeup announcements. The idea of leaving him like this, going back up to that empty bed alone, it’s inconceivable.

“We’re going to my room,” I tell him, which means, it was always an option. I can tell the only person with authority to ask I’m forcing him to watch the games, to torture him, and he’ll believe that as much as anything else I say. I can lock the door to my room, hold him tightly the rest of the night, keep him safe, and put him in chains before anyone else sees. Plan with him, the whole day, so we can strike when the VIPs arrive. Watch the ferocity in him as he rips apart those animals. Earn the right to tear into him after. Detonate the emergency explosives and watch vibrant chunks of Magritte skies fly into the starry night.