Chapter Text
To solve a word search problem, you must scan the grid from top down, from the bottom up, from the left to right, right to left, top left to bottom right, top right to bottom left. It requires no finesse, no clues, only methodology. Sicheng has never had the patience for easy resolutions.
For Sicheng, life happens in fast, staggering fragments of borderline anarchy. His mother always says he has the temperament of a racehorse—stubborn to a fault, prone to being swept up in passion with his shutters down and his vision tunnelled. Somehow, still dependable.
Sicheng much prefers the unpredictability of the cryptic challenges, the puzzles that require clues to solve. The two-way teaser crossword provides you with two sets of clues—one quick, one cryptic—for the same answer. The quick clue will be something like ‘depraved (8)’, and the cryptic tip-off will read, ‘it’s stubborn for every piece of poetry (8)’. And Sicheng will mull it over for fifteen minutes before broadcasting, with a rush of pride, “PERVERSE.” and the pallbearers will whip their heads to his pew, their red-rimmed eyes narrowed in condemnation, coffin like a cross heavy for many reasons across their shoulders.
But that only happens once, and it’s a testament to the strength of his faith—in puzzles, or God, he hasn’t decided yet—that he hadn’t realised he was sat in on a funeral.
Circling back to the point: Sicheng knows his approach to life is a bit unorthodox than most will have it. He embraces the pandemonium and seeks it out in turn. His load is a little racier than most, but he’s always liked a Ferrari—it’s the horsepower.
Which might explain how he ends up here.
It starts like this: late enough for the rare day of heat to calm into an early evening chill, like a cold cloth draped over the nape of the neck. Outside, the neighbourhood kids have sprung out of the shade to play cricket in the road, using stacked cans of dog food as wickets and a broken-down bat. There are toys strewn all over the pavement, a big cardboard box tipped on its side. One of the younger kids, Chenle, is playing animatedly under the lax supervision of his parents. The kettle whistles shrilly on the stove.
With a violent start, the woman at the head of the room pauses mid-speech. Everyone looks around, confused, trying to find the source of the sound drilling like an alarm. Ten half-stands then sits back down and nudges Sicheng hard in the ribs. Sicheng rushes out and frees himself to the solitude of the kitchen. The best company is your own.
It’s still too hot for tea, but Sicheng is trying to sweat out this fever. Nothing wrong with his hypothalamus, this is emotional fever. Symptoms include: a slow simmer of heat under the skin that cannot be scratched or soothed; flushes of humiliation; and increasing fits of pretentious philosophical musings. Ten’s expert diagnosis? Lovesickness.
Sicheng still isn’t sure if that means he’s sick of love, or sick in love. Anyway, he wouldn’t recognise love if he ran into it on the street and it was wearing a set of wings and carrying a bow and arrow. (See: pretentious philosophical musings).
The dull clack of boots on the kitchen tile. Jungwoo strides in wearing a pale blue suit, a tad too formal for the occasion, but he wears extravagance better than anyone else Sicheng knows.
“When they make the movie of your disaster of a life, this will be the opening scene.”
By muscle memory, Sicheng moves around the kitchen, opening cupboards and draws to locate the tea stuff. “Who’s playing me?”
“Scarlett Johansson,” they both say at the same time.
Jungwoo watches him in disbelief, obviously in the kitchen for no other reason than to stare and prod at Sicheng like he’s a zoo animal. “You’re seriously drinking tea? I thought you were just being annoying with the kettle. Ten bought four bottles of Krone specifically for you.”
“He wants me to drink four bottles of Krone?”
“He bought it because it's your favourite, and he wants you to forgive him for something.”
That’s true. He does favour the nutty, almost bark aftertaste of Krone rosé. The problem is, Sicheng has recently begun suspecting himself of having undertaken a rather cumbersome habit behind his own back, so he’s staying sober until he figures himself out. Plus, he’s got that fever, and you aren’t supposed to mix your meds (weed is medicinal) with booze. He’s not a huge fan of the crossfade, anyway.
He forgoes replying in favour of watching the rooibos tea bag bleed out into the water of his cup. No sugar, no milk. He’s all about the herbs. Speaking of—he procures a blunt from the pocket of his slacks. He waves it tauntingly in the air.
Jungwoo makes a show of cowering behind his arms. “Don’t tempt me. I still have to give a speech tonight. And all I have so far is ‘Good evening everyone.’”
Hours later, after speeches, Ten’s mom comes up to him and asks, with a fervour as though the answer will drastically affect her own life, “Any plans to settle down?”
I’m 22, Sicheng almost says, but Kun and Ten are only 24 and this is their engagement party, so he opts for a polite, apologetic smile, and a, “No thanks, I’m on the mend.”
“Sicheng’s just gotten out of a relationship,” Kun says, offering the words up delicately, like he’s afraid they’ll shatter and splinter into the truth.
Sicheng supposes they are true. It’s been a month since he’s ridden out the last spasms of an affair. His ex-partner wasn’t married per se, it’s just that being with Sicheng came at the expense of cheating on his career. Like he said: he’s never had the patience for easy resolutions. Sicheng’s friends had been extremely reproachful about the whole thing, and Ten had even gone so far as to call Sicheng immature, and, well—okay. He’d taken that to his therapist.
His phone buzzes in his pocket. It’s a text from his ex. He’s smart enough to know that Sicheng will not open it, so he’s tailored it to fit the entire message into the text preview.
Extra ticket 2 a musical 2night @10. Be my guest?
It’s these sorts of clichés that cause all the trouble.
He should say no. He should delete the number. Block it. He should burn that bridge. The problem is, he’s an excellent swimmer with near-perfect form. He’ll be across the river before the last wooden slats of the bridge come hurtling aflame into the water. Still, he should say no. Practice some good ol’ self restraint. He can spend the rest of the night getting high with Jungwoo. Or maybe he’ll go home and get high alone in his apartment. The best company is your own.
In the line for the musical Chicago, Sicheng comes to the gutting realisation that he’s been backed into a corner. Of a small, empty room. With cement floors and cement walls. And a large gate but no door. The prison of clichés. The warden? His ex in a sexy policeman costume.
His ex orders them two glasses of red wine. He gives Sicheng a lingering kiss on the cheek. During the intermission, Sicheng says he feels ill and takes the bus home.
╭╮
It culminates like this: Sicheng creeps up the stairs to his apartment with a wine cooler tucked under his arm, feeling equal parts exhausted and vindicated. When he hastens to open the bottle, he stubs his toe on the pointy edge of something, crumples to the floor in pain, and gets a good look at a suspicious looking baggie lying underneath the counter. He squeezes once and knows what it is. He fishes it out of the shadows with a cupped palm. It’s about 3 grams of weed. There’s a small drawing on the plastic, fat raindrops leaking out of a clumsy cloud in blue marker. Someone else’s handwriting. For a rainy day.
Winter is quarter-to over, it hasn’t rained in a week, but lately Sicheng has been dragging himself from place to place as though weighted under the burden of clothes sopping wet. Maybe he’s being dramatic, maybe there’s nothing wrong with him. Strong maybe.
Sicheng feels like Chenle’s box of toys, too big, boring, with his innards strewn all over town for everyone to stop and stare and get angry at. Where are the waste removal men today? Can’t they see someone’s guts right here on the pavement?
“Hello?” Sicheng says immediately when the line connects. He’s burritoed himself under two blankets, and he feels clammy all over, like a porpoise.
“RPC, what’s your emergency? ”
“Good evening, I’m fried out of my mind and I have just ingested a large amount of perfume. I think I need to be quarantined. The high doesn’t feel so good anymore. I think I’m radioactive,” is what Sicheng would have said if he wasn’t fried out of his mind.
Instead, what happens is Sicheng remembers the time he’d handcuffed himself to a chair in the library so he could draw up a two-page crossword in five hours. He had given the key to a woman sitting across from him and told her to let him out at six pm. The problem was, she’d left after two-ish hours, and after four, Sicheng’s hand had started swelling to a pale blue. It wasn’t getting enough oxygen locked to the chair. The librarian and the library guard were both on a smoke break. He could see them outside through the window. While trying to get their attention, he tipped over and sliced the bridge of his nose against the window ledge. Blood everywhere. The librarian had rushed inside and called 911. Sicheng was fined for damaging government property (the chair).
“Hello? This is the Retreat Poison Control Center… What’s your emergency?”
“That’s like 911. When you call 911 they say that,” is what Sicheng eventually says.
“I guess. Do you have an emergency? ”
Does he? There are no sharp objects threatening his flesh. Nothing trailing furiously and urgently out the wound, like his blood has seen enough of the inside of him and is grateful for the reprieve. There are no little red blood cells abandoning ship and yelling, “Drain the Beast!” There is no coup d'état.
“Um,” Sicheng says.
“Are you okay? ”
That’s straightforward enough. “No.”
“Can you tell me what’s wrong? ”
“Good evening, I’m fried out of my mind and I have just ingested a large amount of perfume. I think I need to be quarantined. The high doesn’t feel so good anymore. I think I’m radioactive,” is really what Sicheng should say.
“My friend just drank a bunch of perfume.”
“Is your friend conscious? ”
Sicheng’s eyes dart over to the wall-mounted mirror just to double check. “Um. Yes.”
“Are they displaying any signs of nausea or general distress? ”
A half minute after downing the bottle of perfume, Sicheng’s stomach lurched in an immediate rejection of the toxins. Initially, that was fine because Sicheng has licked a lot of things he probably shouldn’t have over the course of twenty-two years, and, really, he’s never one to be ailed, so when the liquid rushed back up out of his body house rather rudely after not so much as a glance at his interior decorating, that was fine. Until everything he’d eaten over the course of the day violently pulsed out, too.
“Yeah, it was brutal, I threw up a bunch right after,” Sicheng shifts uncomfortably at the memory. His stomach pangs in concert.
There’s a kind of controlled urgency to the operator’s voice when they immediately respond with, “Your friend, are they in distress? ”
Sicheng facepalms when he realises his slip up. He pulls himself together, he’s usually a better liar. “Oh, yes, he’s tweaking, I mean, he’s really freaking out.”
“Can you estimate how much perfume he drank? ”
“Um.”
There’s no label or quantity indicator anywhere on the bottle, so he has to estimate based on the way the bottle fits in his hand. Sicheng moulds his palm carefully around the bottle, then slides it off slowly to retain the shape. He holds his palm up to the phone so the poison control guy on the other end of the voice call can see. Then he realises he’s holding his palm up to the phone so the poison control guy on the other end of the voice call can see, and laughter rips out of him like a scream.
“Oh my god, are you okay? Hello? ”
Sicheng is doubled over with painful snickers, not even the rising sea of nausea can settle him.
A long suffering sigh tins through the phone speaker. “Is this a prank call? ”
Sicheng squirms out of his blanket cocoon, and briefly he thinks this is his butterfly moment. But when he emerges, pale and blinded by the overhead light, he’s just slimy with sweat and probably green-tinged with nausea like in the cartoons. Still a worm.
“What? Wait what? No, I—” Sicheng scrambles to explain why the situation is so funny, the words good evening and perfume and radioactive queuing neatly up his throat, but then the operator cuts him off.
“It’s nearly 2 in the morning, dude. Have a heart. ”
That tempers him. The words tumble out of his mouth before he can rethink them, “Oh no, yes, you’re right, I’m so sorry, m’sorry, I’ll hang up now, oh man, sorry about this.”
After he hastily ends the call, his actions catch up to him in excruciatingly slow motion, and he sits with the phone in his hand for a bit, stewing in the ridiculousness of it all. Then his stomach lurches and he redials the number without thinking.
“RPC, what’s your emergency? ” It’s the same guy.
“Wait, I actually did drink the perfume,” Sicheng admits. He’s started taking shallow breaths to stave off the nausea.
With audible doubt, the poison control guy says, “Really? ”
Sicheng nods. “Yeah, I was super high. It’s a long story. Embarrassing.”
“Well now I have to hear it. ”
Sicheng shifts uncomfortably. “And this is like client-patient confidentiality, right? Like therapy or counselling?”
“No. This is not at all like what you just said. ”
“Why not?”
“I’m not a therapist. And, not saying that we’re in any way affiliated, but they literally air 911 calls on the news all the time .”
And—okay. Sicheng knows that. He’s even been on the news before. Very local news. That’s beside the point.
The point: Sicheng has been called immature a handful of times, usually at the tail end of one or a combination of his antics, and it has only ever hurt him once or twice. He gets it. He—how had his ex put it? He’s oftentimes too secretive to have a decent conversation with; manipulative just to see what’ll happen; impulsive if left unattended for too long; occasionally experiences enlightening, unexpected bouts of ego death; is perpetually horny (which isn’t exactly immature if you think about it, but it relates to the bit about impulse); careless; and likes the store-bought kids macaroni options more than the adult ones. He gets it.
Did he mention that his ex was his therapist?
Anyway, immature has become kind of a safe zone underneath which Sicheng operates, because it's become his most identifiable action marker. And honesty comes easier when he’s got that benchmark. It’s a juvenile starting point, and possibly unhealthy to lump all his bad decisions as inherently rooted in immaturity, but that’s as far as he got in therapy before he’d had to quit his sessions.
The truth lurches out of him with more ease and urgency than the perfume did. All in all, it comes out with surprising clarity for what amounts essentially to word-vomit. Great structure, a good narrative voice. Sicheng wishes he were sober, so he could transcribe it for a storytime on his YouTube channel.
“Okay. Um. I was mad at myself because I did something that I guess you could call immature, and then I acted out and did something irresponsible and—fuck it. I met up with my ex after we broke up last month, then I felt stupid about it so I snuck into my best friend’s house and stole a wine cooler off his kitchen counter, I guess because we’re in a fight right now and I was feeling impulsive—remember, I said I acted out—anyway, I got home, found something that belonged to my ex, smoked it.
“I mean… I don’t do drugs, officer… Um. Wait, I already told you I was high, right? Ugh, whatever. I smoked the weed, downed the bottle, and, surprise! Wasn’t a wine cooler. It was a bottle of fancy fucking perfume that doesn’t even say perfume on it. But also, I thought it was a wine cooler before the weed, so we might’ve been here anyway, even if I hadn’t found the stash.”
An extended period of silence. Then,
“I see ,” The poison control guy’s voice bleeds with concern. He sounds vaguely awestruck. “That’s… wow, I’m so sorry this was your night. ”
That’s… not what Sicheng had been expecting. The PC guy says it like its just a thing that happened. Just one bad night, when Sicheng’s been having too many of those recently.
“I—thank you.”
“I’m sorry about your break-up, too. I don’t know how I feel about the theft, yet. ”
Sicheng smiles at that. He honestly hadn’t even expected the guy to be paying attention to his little (but well structured, engaging, worth fleshing out into something more) ramble.
“You said you were immediately sick, can you estimate the amount of perfume you drank? ”
“Not really, there’s no label. I drank the whole bottle. It’s this big.”
After a pause, “Are you gesturing with your hand right now? ”
Sicheng immediately drops his hand from mid-air suspension. “Yes. Oh. Again. Shit, sorry. I don’t know why I thought smoking some more after throwing up would mellow me out, I’m tweaking and I feel like a worm.”
A cautious laugh. “What’s your name? ”
No way in hell is he allowing this to trace back to him.
“Jungwoo Kim,” Sicheng mumbles.
“What was that? ”
“Sicheng.”
Jesus Christ.
“Okay, hi Sicheng, I’m Yuta. Your reactions to the toxins don’t sound so bad, even though the weed probably made it worse. Uh, you don’t have any vertigo, or anything? You can stand up okay? Perfumes have a high alcohol content, plus there’s a whole lot of additives to make it poisonous and generally repulsive to drink. ”
“I can stand fine. My vision is fine. Are you making fun of me? I’m, like, deathly ill.”
“No, I’m not, and no you aren’t. You should drink a lot of water and eat a small sugar-heavy or carb-heavy snack to keep your blood-sugar up. ”
Oh. “Oh, so I don’t need to call 911, or something? We have a clinic but I think it’s closed, and the nearest hospital is thirty minutes out of town.”
“Do you live in Epping? ”
That makes him pause. Epping and Retreat are sister towns, twins even, separated by a fifteen minute walk. Epping is the smaller of the two, too small to have its own poison control center, or mall, or hospital. It’s not something Sicheng would think to ask if he was on the other end of the call. Then again, Sicheng’s done numerous things that normal people probably wouldn’t even consider.
“Why?” He asks, then for some reason immediately says, “Yes. Do you take orders at Park’s Pizza Plaza?”
“Nope. Why? ”
That’s probably true. The name of the only guy who takes orders at PPP is Jaemin. There’s no reason for Sicheng to be fishing for conversation with a dude who works at a control center at 2 in the morning, but here he is.
“Just. Your voice. It’s familiar, I guess.”
“Really? ” Yuta says, and it sounds like he’s smiling. God. “You don’t need to go to the hospital. I’m sure you’ll be fine after the water and snack. ” Oh, right. That’s why he called. He just drank a bottle of fucking perfume.
“And, yeah. I don’t think you need me anymore. But obviously if your symptoms persist, you should call me again. Uh. The line. Call the control center. I’ll pick up, anyway. I’m the only dude on calls, so. And. Sorry, again. Break-ups are tough. But I don’t think what happened was necessarily immature. Not trying to sound judge-y, but maybe cut back on the petty theft? ”
Sicheng laughs, but it sounds more like a kind of wounded yelp. “Yeah, strong maybe, though. Thank you for saving my life.”
“I didn’t save your life. ”
He curls up into an embarrassed armadillo ball. “Okay, I’m gonna hang up. Thank you for everything. Forget all of it.”
╭╮
Sicheng settles on the ledge of his kitchen window to watch the sky clear into a powdery blue, sun like a perfect yolk out from behind the clouds. A mug of green tea is scorching his left palm as he holds his phone up to his ear with his other hand. The line goes dead and Sicheng puffs out his cheeks to heave a loud, dramatic sigh.
“I’m going down to Ten,” Sicheng grumbles reluctantly. “He can’t understand me on the phone.”
In the far end of the room, Baby leaps from Sicheng’s bed onto the windowsill. She meows and Sicheng shuffles over, bundled thick in his comforter to let her out onto the fire escape. After a week of clear skies, it rained all weekend. The grey clouds have cleared, but a chilled breeze still pushes Sicheng’s hair back off his forehead, and slithers into the gaps between the blanket and his neck. The last of winter melts into the pavement in a dark grey, solid hail to water. Baby springs onto a low-hanging branch of a mango tree, shaking loose accumulated drops of dew and rain from its leaves.
When he walks out onto the pavement, Ten is already there, trying to light a half gone cigarette. He’s facing the town square where some people from out of town are setting up banners and sales tables for a pyramid scheme presentation.
The flame of Ten’s lighter wavers in the breeze each time he lifts it to his lips. When he notices Sicheng standing there he gives him a long look.
Sicheng and Ten haven’t spoken directly since two weeks ago Tuesday, when they’d gotten into an argument about something petty and it had snowballed quickly. After a particularly riveting back-and-forth, Ten had gotten that look in his eyes, that aim to kill, and said, “It’s so fascinating how you are incapable of absolutely any human emotion whatsoever.” He’d stuttered halfway through, as if parsing the sentence together as it went. And it had been the perfect thing to say.
And Sicheng, possibly proving his point, had kept his expression blank, unbuckled his seatbelt and climbed out of the car. The walk home had taken him twenty minutes. Ten had to call someone to move the car out of the McDonald’s drive thru because he can’t drive.
His nose and cheeks are rubbed red from the cold.
“You won’t believe what happened to me on Friday,” says Sicheng, and just like that, the weeks of silence dissolve into nonexistence.
“Tell me,” Ten says, eyes lighting up with a relieved sort of eagerness that’s hard not to match. “I think I’m in for an upgrade.”
Sicheng holds out his hand. Ten fishes his waterlogged cell phone out of his pocket and hands it over. The entire thing is cracked and bleeding ink, so that barely anything on the screen is legible. “Short version? I chugged a bottle of perfume because I think I’m an alcoholic and then I had to call poison control then I drank some water.” Sicheng turns the phone over a few times in his palm. He doesn’t really know what he’s supposed to be seeing, but he offers sympathy with a sigh, anyway. “At least you have Kun’s phone.”
Ten is staring at him, eyebrows knitted, lips slightly parted, breathing out white puffs of condensation, with a mixture of awe and horror like he’s just witnessed a small explosion.
“What do you think?” Sicheng asks wryly. “Take this one to the therapist?
“Absolutely not!” Ten blurts out. When Sicheng laughs he lets out a weak chuckle. “Get a new therapist.”
Sicheng has something really clever to say about that, but Ten cuts him off. “So you’re saying that you drank perfume to find out if you were an alcoholic?”
“No, I drank an entire bottle of perfume in one go because I thought it was wine, which confirmed that I’m possibly an alcoholic, because according to Yuta, perfume is supposed to taste repulsive.”
Ten looks utterly confused, and Sicheng wishes he remembered the speech from Friday, the one he’d given Yuta the Poison Control Guy.
“Wait, wait wait. Who’s Yuta?”
“The poison control guy.”
“But how,” Sicheng can see the gears in Ten’s mind whirring. “Alcoholism? What’s this about? Where did you even get perfume from, don’t you just use air freshener?”
Do you need a refill?” He points to Ten’s lighter that’s low on gas. A diversion.
“Sicheng,” Ten says, in his Substitute Parent voice.
A failed diversion.
Sicheng inconspicuously crosses his arms over his chest to protect his nipples. “Your house is concerningly boneless. The back door was open. Sorr—”
Ten swats hard at his chest. “You took the perfume Kun bought me as an engagement present?! It was really expensive!”
“I know that! I know that now!” Sicheng yells pitifully.
Ten has paled significantly since the start of their conversation, and it’s probably not because of the cold. “Give me your phone.”
“Why?”
Ten gestures impatiently with his hand. “Gimme.”
“Are you mugging me?” Sicheng backs up defensively. “Dude, I’ll pay you back for the perfume.”
Ten inches closer, determined. “I’m calling your mom.”
“My mom? She’s a doula, what’s she gonna do, re-deliver me? No, get away, go away, don’t come any closer! Stop, you know I don’t like being chased! Ten, leave me alone, I can run fifty miles!”
Sicheng makes it across the town square before he hunkers over to catch his breath, over-hot from running. His nostrils flare with how hard he’s breathing. A few paces behind him, Ten is breathing evenly, up on his metaphorical high horse with his hands on his hips, waiting Sicheng out.
“Come with me to get a refill,” Ten says eventually, after the stretched silence.
They walk back across the square with several feet between them. Outside the market, Ten says, “I’m sorry.” He stuffs one of his hands into Sicheng’s coat pocket to interlace their fingers.
“I’m sorry, too,” says Sicheng, earnestly. He gives Ten’s hand a firm squeeze that he hopes conveys more sincerity than he can with words.
They loiter outside the market so Ten can smoke. He keeps peering out of the corner of his eye, like he’s waiting for Sicheng to drop his guard so he can grab his phone out of his pocket. Sicheng points across the street, at a bench in the town square. “Look, there’s Baby.”
Curled up on the wooden bench, Baby naps adorably. The wind’s mostly settled, but still Sicheng has chicken skin under his wool-lined jacket. He hopes Baby’s not cold. Ten follows his outstretched hand and coos when he sees Baby. He gives her a cute little wave, even though her eyes are closed. Ten turns to him with a delicate expression. He regards Sicheng with the same apprehension one would a wounded, skittish animal.
“Sicheng, you—”
The big town clock gongs loudly, signalling the hour. What a way to live: hour to hour with much fanfare, a great big boom to mark another 60 minutes passed. It’s 10 am now, the hours before file themselves away into the past, and—oh fuck. “Oh fuck!” Sicheng exclaims loud enough to attract glares from several directions, and turns to sprint down the road.
╭╮
“Please address the camera. State your name and position, and a little about what you do here.”
“I eat a banana first thing in the morning ,” comes grunting through the speaker at Sicheng’s ear.
Sicheng’s face is flushed a ripe red, and if the gross stickiness he feels all over his body is any indication, he’s visibly sweating, too. He’s clutching slipping stacks of magazines and papers in both of his sweaty hands, and trying to find a place to lay them down without walking in front of the camera. Into his phone, he says, “And?”
“Every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is eat a banana .”
Shifting in his seat, Sicheng’s boss smooths down his tie and takes a deep, steadying breath. “My name is Moon Taeil, I have been the Director of the Epping Department of Parks and Recreation for six years. I oversee major and minor projects aimed at encouraging healthy lifestyles for the residents of this town, while working towards putting Epping on the map as a prime recreation destination.”
Taeil smiles once, tense and tight-lipped, and regards the boy behind the tripod. “Was that okay?”
“Yeah, I hear you,” Sicheng says. “But I don’t think that makes you super-fucking-healthy. I think it just makes you someone who eats a banana in the morning.”
A sigh through the speaker. “Well, then I’ve got nothing. What’s up with you? ”
“I’m doing the crypto-quote, spiral and brainbuster this week,” Sicheng replies with a sigh of his own. He spends a few minutes slumped against a wall.
“I love it when you do the crypto-quote. Lovely. I look forward to it. ”
Cameraboy gives a thumbs up, then makes an OK sign and steps out from behind the camera. “Yeah dude, that was sick. You were, like, really professional, so thanks. I hope the rest go this quick so I can catch the 5:20 bus out.”
Sicheng moderates a few more hard breaths and pushes up off the wall. “Okay, bye mom, I have to go.”
“You’re late,” Taeil admonishes as Sicheng holds the stack of papers out to him. The camera guy handles the thing off the tripod and points it at Taeil, who addresses it with, “These are drafts for campaign badges. I am running for city council.” He stands in the middle of the room and gestures proudly to the array of pins, ribbons, glue, glitter and other craft items scattered across his desk and partially on the floor. There’s a yellow ribbon around his neck and confetti in his hair he hasn’t noticed yet.
The cameraman zooms in on a Ten-shaped lump spread out on the wooden bench directly opposite Taeil’s desk. The lump flashes the camera a blank look and gives a two-finger salute.
To the camera, Taeil says, “Ten is really trendy, so I’ve asked him to help me with the fun part of my campaigning.”
Avoiding Ten’s suspicious gaze, Sicheng says, “Sorry. I ran here.”
Ten squints up at him. “But I got here an hour before you. And we came from the same place.”
“I got lost,” Sicheng says, glancing nervously at the camera.
Ten gathers himself into a seated position. Even Taeil stops paging through documents to look at Sicheng as though he’s just lost his mind. Ten says, “You got lost… on your way to the job you’ve had for two years… for an hour. You live five minutes from here.”
The three men present all regard Sicheng with looks ranging from confused (Taeil) and intrigued (camera guy), to downright suspicious (Ten). He scoops up everything he’d come in with and holds them in front of his chest like a shield. Slowly easing out of the office, Sicheng chuckles awkwardly. “I know, it’s so weird, right?”
“I am at Epping Beauty getting a mani pedi. As a public figure, I always need to be in top form. Especially with all the handshakes, and when I want to wear flip flops to work on casual day,” Taeil gestures blindly to his left. “Sicheng and Ten are here because we still have work to do, so we’re multitasking it. Okay, so where are we on public opinion?”
In the chair beside him, reclined all the way back into a lying position, Ten has a pair of bulky headphones over his ears, playing waterfall sounds at full blast. He’s getting a pretty thorough face massage and a base coat on his fingernails. Sicheng is rifling through a tray of dark polishes, looking for something close enough to the one called ‘Fungal’ his brother had made for his birthday.
“Why are you still talking like that, the camera dude isn’t even here.”
“I’m practici—ow, cucumber in the eye! Aah, why is it burning, Sicheng did you lick them again?! Should I close my eyes?!” Taeil flails around, and the nail tech pins his ankles down so he can keep working.
Sicheng sighs and settles for a swampy green. “Most of the people we canvassed knew you, so that’s good. They know you from your speeches at the town meetings, and when you were on the news about the city hall kitchen fire, so that’s cool.”
“How many votes did we get?”
“Eleven.”
Taeil uses his palms to knock the cucumbers off his eyes, careful not to smudge his neatly trimmed, buffed and clear-coated nails. “What? How many people did you talk to?”
“Like a billion.”
“Oh, no. What are we gonna do? Ten?” Taeil nudges the seemingly asleep form beside him and Ten’s eyes shoot open. His face is all droopy and his mouth hangs open. The masseur is rubbing circles into his cheeks.
“Your eyes are super red,” Ten yells over the whoosh of his headphones.
╭╮
Sicheng slumps into his apartment after work like a slinky going down stairs. From the door he trudges over to faceplant on the couch wherefrom he rolls onto the floor and partially underneath the coffee table. Staring back at him, eyes dark as the abyss, is Baby. He has no idea how she got back into the apartment, then he remembers he left the window open.
He has three hours to start and finish a crypto-quote puzzle for publication. He shuffles out from under the table, settles into the couch and re-dialls a number. He always works best under pressure.
The call connects after the third ring.
“RPC, what’s your emergency? ”
It’s a different voice. That pokes a hole into Sicheng’s confidence.
“Um. Hi. I’m looking for Yuta?”
“...Who is this? ”
“I’m his—” THINK. THINK. “Mommmm… I’m his mom.”
A disbelieving snort. “Why does his mom sound like a thirty-five year old chainsmoker? ”
“Okay, fine, I’m his friend,” Sicheng acquiesces. He flips open to a random page the monstrous collection of poetry perched on the coffee table. Some Shakespeare glares up at him in a brittle-looking font.
“Oh, yeah, that sounds convincing. If you’re his friend, why didn’t you just call his cellphone? ”
“Because… he doesn’t have a phone,” Sicheng tries, already mentally conceding defeat.
He cradles the phone between his shoulder and ear, and hefts the big book onto his lap to get more involved. He’s looking for something short and easy.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster. — Elizabeth Bishop
His mother won’t like that.
The long stretch of silence from the other end is expected. Sicheng wouldn’t be surprised if the operator had hung up.
Through tall glades darkness
Evaporates. The shapes of trees
Separate from night’s folding,
And into my sombre heart
Light penetrates. — Mavis Orpen
“Hello? ”
Baby leaps up onto the couch.
“Yuta, hi.”
“Sicheng? ”
Relief colours Sicheng’s cheeks. A large—treacherous, self-antagonising—part of himself had expected the two days of weekend to wipe clean any memory Yuta would have of him. There’s something like surprise in his voice, and Sicheng can’t tell if it’s the good kind or not.
“Yeah, um. I thought you were the only one on calls.”
“We… got someone else. ”
“Oh. Okay.”
Bored by the non-action of the current happenings, Baby slinks back out the window without so much a backwards meow, a lady of the night.
“Yeah, I’m taking some classes at community college, so. ”
“Oh, nice, yeah, so you—yeah. Makes sense,” Sicheng nervously flips through three pages without even looking at them. He sits up straighter. “Sorry, I—”
“So what’s up with you? Glad to hear you made it through the weekend alive. ”
The remark jolts a shocked, delighted laugh out of Sicheng. He sags back into the couch cushions, a conspiratorial edge to his voice as he says, “Oh, believe me, I’m just as surprised.”
Yuta’s laugh is higher pitched and impressively childlike. It slices through all Sicheng’s hesitancy, and he finds himself smiling almost reflexively. He picks up off the couch and goes to sit on the kitchen window ledge. The view looks out over the town square, the meeting barn, and a row of storefronts to the far left. City hall is tucked into the far left corner, a red-brick landmark set against the dark wood sprawling out behind it.
“I hope there isn’t anyone desperately trying to get through to this number while I’m, like, hogging your time with my dismal life.”
He is trying to make Yuta laugh again, to give the conversation some purpose. All he gets in response is a hum and, “Mondays are super slow, actually.”
“Oh. That’s good, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
“Should I drink some Pledge?”
“You’ll die.”
“Yeah,” Sicheng agrees easily.
Every first Thursday of the month, the Epping bookstore rearranges the reading area with rows of seats and a projector for a free movie night. On one such occasion, Sicheng, Kun and Ten undertook the roles of resident rowdy teenagers in the back row. They were talking, loudly, about Sicheng possibly, maybe, unlikely though, signing up as a scout leader for the next Epping scouts camp. Puppy love kind of flips you inside out like that, makes you want to do more, want more, be more than what you’d normally allow yourself.
The problems (or, ‘hurdles’ as Kun placated) were that Sicheng was 1) almost always stoned; 2) prone to lying for no reason; and 3) generally apathetic towards anyone more than two years younger than him. These were problems/hurdles because—according to Sicheng’s brother who sat eavesdropping from the row in front of them—they were not the qualities of a good leader. That, and,
“You’re good at,” Ten started, avoiding Sicheng’s gaze, making floppy wrist motions in the air as he tried to find his words. Sicheng thought he’d offer Ten a clue as to where the words might be, perhaps in the teacher’s comment section of his primary school report cards? Sicheng is an excellent isolator. Sicheng deals well with independence. Sicheng is great at sharing, but sometimes appears confused or irritated when other children approach him to play.
“...ensuring silence,” Ten concluded, putting emphasis on the words to indicate that there are much nastier ways to make the same point, and he’d spared Sicheng the offense.
“Is that a criticism about me?” Sicheng asked, crunching his back teeth on the salty, buttery unpopped kernels from the bottom of the popcorn tub.
Ten said, “It’s an observation.”
Sicheng said, “Observations are the basis of criticisms.”
“It’s just an honest observation, there’s no agenda, ugh, Kun tell him how he is,” Ten replied in a huff.
Kun, by now enraptured with the little bits of the movie he could glimpse in between the obscuring rows of heads and shoulders, turned to Sicheng with a confused, “How you are?”
Sicheng snorted. “Fine thanks, and you?”
And that had been the end of that. Ten stopped probing. Sicheng didn’t sign up. He and Johnny Suh broke up.
So, anyway, Sicheng had been expecting this. This being Sicheng puncturing a hole in any conversation by saying something weird or uninteresting, or seeming uninterested, and ensuring silence.
Yuta is silent on the other end.
“Sorry if this is awkward, I just wanted to say thank you again for Friday. It was nice to have someone to talk to, and your advice really helped. So. Thanks,” Sicheng finishes feebly, giving Yuta a clean, resolute out from the conversation.
“Hey, no problem, really, it’s my job, and all. And I’m glad I could help. What are you paging through? ”
“Poetry.”
“Oh cool. Read me one .”
“‘I suppose that out of the toll / Of many days / There will come the illumination / Of achievement.’ That’s ‘Travail’ by Mavis Orpen.”
“Oh. That’s. Yeah, I’ve thought that. I’ve thought that before, am I a poet? ” Yuta says, not derisively, but like he’s truly considering it.
“Anyone’s a poet. What I’m looking for is a short verse to turn into a code.”
“And you enjoy turning verse into codes? ”
“It’s for my freelance work.” Which isn’t technically a no.
“Ah. ”
“How’s college?”
“Weird. I enrolled kinda late into the year, so everyone’s a little ahead of me, but that’s fine. ”
“Maybe you should join a society.”
“Yeah. Hey listen, my boss is here, I have to go, or I’ll get fired and lose my minimum wage. ”
Sicheng feels immediately surplus, like he’s taking up slightly too much space. “Oh. Of course, yeah. Go, it’s cool.”
“Uh, I’d give you my personal number but I don’t have a phone, so. How did you even guess that, by the way, should I be worried? But yeah, bye, take care. ”
“Goodbye. Thanks, again, one last time.”
╭╮
Who invented bureaucracy? Who took a good look at a clear, bright blue sky, sun like a warming balm over the skin, and thought: today is a great day for convoluted administrative paperwork in a stuffy office?
Sicheng is at his desk, shredding papers out of boredom, licking and reapplying strawberry cheesecake flavoured gloss off/onto his lips, when his boss strides into the room, looking defeated. He’s going back and forth with some guy about the bookstore screenings.
Eventually they come to some resigned agreement, and the old guy leaves. Yangyang, who had been filming the entire thing, regards Taeil from behind the camera.
“What’s he so riled up about?”
Taeil glances briefly at Sicheng, who pauses with a stack of papers held over the shredder, then at the camera. “The thing about the bookstore screenings is…” he says, with brows furrowed and seemingly much difficulty. His eyes glaze over as he stares off into the distance.
“People keep having sex at them,” Sicheng finishes with a smile. The camera swings shakily over to him and he gives it a thumbs up.
Taeil laughs, emptily, and retreats into his office.
Lunch. The only bright splotch in the dullness of the salaryman’s work week. With sporadic input from Taeil, Sicheng is filling out a crossword in the office kitchen.
Suddenly, a gust of hot air heads straight to the counter they’re leaning against.
“Taeil, how are you?” HR crawls up out of the slits in the linoleum floor, with his no-nonsense disposition, and a tone that demands to know the answer. Yangyang trails behind him, camera obscuring most of his face.
Struggling to free his soup container from cling film (as he has been for the past ten minutes), Taeil responds with his public service smile and says, “Good afternoon, I’m very well, thanks. I’m about to go and eat lunch.”
“I see that,” HR says, smiling a perfect plastic thing. He shuffles his clipboard from one arm to the other. “I will walk you to your office.”
“I don’t eat in my office.”
“Why not?”
“What’s another word for ‘caustic’? It needs to be seven letters,” Sicheng says, looking up from the glorious two-page spread in his hands. Everyone ignores him.
Taeil gives the camera a quick, annoyed glance. He looks at HR then back down at his soup. He begrudgingly confesses: “My assistant likes to stare at me through the window and do these tiny, fast nods the entire time I’m eating. He says he’s doing a spell for me to have good digestion.”
HR frowns and jots something down on his clipboard, holding it close to his face so the camera can’t see. He says, “Your assistant is Dong Sicheng, correct?”
Taeil turns to spare Sicheng an apprehensive look. It’s very possible that HR—a bureaucrat by temperament, who’s encountered most of the people in city hall only on paper—has no idea that Sicheng is standing right here, lips the flavour of strawberry cheesecake. Sicheng blinks back at him, the picture of innocence, and Taeil grabs his soup container off the counter and leaves the kitchen with a terse nod to HR.
“What’s another word for ‘caustic’? It has to be seven letters.”
“Uhhh, ” Sicheng can hear Yuta counting softly under his breath. It’s weirdly endearing. “Well, it’s not ‘biting’, that’s six letters. Uhh— ”
“I got it,” Sicheng jumps out of bed to locate the magazine on the coffee table. It’s folded open onto one half of the two-page crossword puzzle. “It’s ‘acerbic’.”
Yuta laughs. “You have a bigger brain than me.”
“And a smaller head though,” Sicheng smiles. Then coughs, and tacks on, “probably.”
“Yeeeah, ” Yuta says, warily, then his voice smooths out into a smile when he says, “What’s the shape of your head? You can tell a lot about a person by the shape of their head. ”
Sicheng walks over to the wall-mounted mirror and surveys the circumference of his head. Suddenly self-conscious, he says, “It’s round. Why, are there other shapes?”
Yuta laughs brashly. “Mine’s kinda weird. ”
“What, like it’s square?” Sicheng asks, at the window now, trying to lure Baby inside with little psst-psst s. Shrouded by nightfall, she watches him from the fire escape, flicking her tail. “A square head?”
“Yeah. All my thoughts come in tetris blocks.”
Sicheng huffs a laugh and drags a hand over his face, once again ridiculously endeared by Yuta, who, he’s beginning to realise, is kind of weird.
“What are you doing now? ”
“Trying to lure the neighbourhood cat into my apartment when she and I both know I have nothing to offer her besides an intense cuddle session that really only enriches my life. And you?”
“Just finishing up over here,” Yuta says, which is code for my shift ended a while ago, and now I’m going home, which is code for we have to stop talking now.
It’s nearing 10 pm. Yuta’s shift ended at 9 pm.
Over the past few weeks, he and Yuta had fallen into a rhythm of regular phone calls at scheduled times—as regular as a phone call can be when it’s dispatched from one person to a control center made for poison-related emergencies; the reason being to conjure up or continue conversations about decidedly non-emergencies with an employee who’s off his shift, but stays at work to entertain the aforementioned conversations.
The topic of meeting in person comes up a couple times, vaguely, although disguised in jokes, and never spans long enough for any concrete perspectives from either of them to cement.
Not once has Sicheng been able to pinpoint how or why this friendship has sparked. Does anyone know for sure what forces draw certain people together?
That distinct feeling of surplusness, of rash decisions, spills over Sicheng. He suddenly feels like he’s trying to goad Yuta into a friendship that’s misshapen like a tetris block and serves no purpose in the real world.
He decides he won’t call tomorrow, or the next day, just to see what difference it will make in his own, personal world.
╭╮
In a few weeks it’s spring hot. Everything’s got a bold colour to it, the flowers in the green patch of the town square are at their best, swaying gently in the afternoon breeze. Sicheng is in the community garden loosening mulberries from their branches and into a wooden crate. A scarecrow jumps out from behind the mango tree.
“Boo!” It says, and Sicheng glares at it, and, oh—it’s not a scarecrow, it’s the scarecrow. The Epping scarecrow with his tattered robe and black-rimmed eyes.
Sicheng launches a mulberry at him. He catches it in his mouth.
“It’s so hot and you’re in all this black. Doesn’t it get tired being goth?”
“I’m not like you,” says the scarecrow, letting mulberry juice stain his teeth and trail out the corner of his matte black mouth like blood.
“It’s all performance art with you,” Sicheng mocks good-naturedly, affecting an exaggeratedly posh, no-nonsense accent. “Take a break sometime. Wear shorts.”
“I’m not like you.”
Sicheng puts down the crate. He uses his shirt to wipe away sweat from his forehead and temples. “Oh, is this one of your performance pieces? Are you doing it right now?”
No response.
“Pass me that empty crate between the carrots,” Sicheng instructs, moving to unburden the grapevine. The scarecrow does so, wordlessly. “Hand me a bowl of ground.”
They work in companionable silence for a few minutes as they weave through the garden, picking fruit for the local diner.
Sicheng plucks up the courage to ask, “So have you heard yet? About me and…” the therapist.
The scarecrow nods.
Sicheng chuckles dryly. Because it's just them, he loosens the vice grip on his heart and lets a little honesty bleed out. “I can’t believe people are still talking. Sorry if I’m, like, ruining your rep around here. I know you spent all those nights camped out in the woods behind city hall to convince people you live there.”
The scarecrow wipes at the dried juice on his mouth. He checks to make sure there’s no one else around, then says, “Mom said to give you a kiss from her the next time I see you.”
Sicheng, standing slumped over with self-pity, is now trying very hard not to smile. “So give it.”
“Why?”
“I want it.”
Pouting hard, the scarecrow says, “Maybe if you came by the house more often you could get it yourself.”
It’s as close to an I miss you as Sicheng thinks he’ll get. With a loud, high-pitched whine reserved for embarrassing his younger sibling, Sicheng says, “At least give me a hug, Renjunnie, please.”
Renjun screeches like an underworld beast and tries clawing out of Sicheng’s firm hold. As far as hugs go, it’s not one of the worst they’ve shared.
“You love me. Say it. Say you love me in front of these grapes, let them hear you.”
“I’m not like you!” Renjun yells and Sicheng lets him go. Renjun crushes a handful of mulberries in his palm and smears the red across his mouth and chin then rushes out of the garden.
Maybe Sicheng is normal. He stacks one fruit crate on top of the other and carries them out to the diner.
When he gets home, there’s a text from an unknown number waiting on his phone. The message preview sends the tiny man in his brain plummeting a great depth to the bottom of his stomach. Before he even opens the full message, he’s thinking up a witty, likable response.
Hi Sicheng its yuta (via my coworker’s phone as promised haha) i have to say when you were giving me ur number i thought u were pranking me bc of all the 4-2-0s haha. i still am not sure if this is really u, or even really a number, but im trying my luck anyway. Im off work all week for this huge college project i have so just letting u know. But i hope ure doing well, loving the earth and being kind to urself (this means staying away from perfumes that look like wine coolers) p.s. I watched one of ur youtube videos and i was laughing and crying so much the man who works at the internet cafe asked me if i needed someone to talk to
Sicheng shoves his phone into his pillowcase and flips the pillow over. He takes a long, hot shower.
As the college semester progressed, Yuta found himself running into less free time and more school work, and their hours on the toll free line had been cut down to a mere half an hour, sometimes just a quick hi and bye. This, until Yuta tentatively asked for Sicheng’s number (each caller is given complete confidentiality in this regard), because he’d talked his new coworker into letting him borrow her phone.
It was at that moment Sicheng realised their entire friendship had been relying on the tenterhooks of whether or not Sicheng would decide to call the control center again. The fact that he does, every time, is more effort than he’s put into a lot of things (namely: work at city hall) lately. The fact that Yuta is always there on the other end of the line, makes him seem fictitious in a way that Sicheng knows he isn’t. Or hopes he isn’t.
He wonders, not for the first time, just how much this phone call friendship is affecting the grand scheme of his life. Does it quantify as an internet thing? A millennial thing? Is Sicheng one of the millenials killing the face-to-face industry? He isn’t even a millennial, but is Yuta?
Their hours of conversation feel like a novelty, a kind of far-removed chunk of reality that floats above the rest of his life. It bears no consequence on the mundane meniality of his days, and yet it does enrich his life somewhat.
Sicheng has an excellent memory for practical reasons—remembering clues to the two-way teaser, mind-looping events like a drawn-out highlight reel to critique things he’s said, things he could have said—and he finds that remembering a conversation with Yuta during the day can bring a goofy smile to his face.
One of his favourite moments to extract from his bank of memories is when, during a comfortable lull in their conversation, Yuta had remarked, in that offhand, crowd-pleasing way of his: “This is almost like online dating, in a way.” Immediately, Sicheng’s imagined fever had spiked to a hundred and five. He remembered how important it was to keep his heart to himself lest he infect anyone else. Actually, he felt like he was teetering on the precipice of a very tall hill.
╭╮
The bizarreness at work is a welcome reprieve from the catastrophic non-catastrophe of Sicheng’s life. To be honest, he’d been expecting some kind of cataclysmic shift, a for sure disturbance in the natural disturbance that was already his life. But he’d chugged the perfume and things had been bad for a while, and then he’d drank the water, ate the twinkies, and he was fine. Life went on. His ex didn’t call. He hadn’t told anyone about the perfume, apart from Ten, who had told Kun (who holds secrets free of charge), and Yuta, although Sicheng thinks there’s nothing he wouldn’t tell Yuta if he asked.
On one of their increasingly rare control center conversations, Yuta explained to Sicheng just how strongly he feels about… everything.
“I don’t know. I get that weird pang in my chest and it doesn’t settle for hours, sometimes. I cried at that new KFC commercial. ”
Sicheng burst out laughing, but not unkindly, and he knew Yuta wouldn’t interpret it negatively. “The one where all the elders pretend to bless the little boy, but really they’re rubbing their greasy hands all over his bald head?”
“It’s not even sad! ” Yuta huffed through the line, light-hearted in his self-mockery. He’s so easy to talk to, so casual with things that, ordinarily, Sicheng would be mortified to divulge to anyone that isn’t Ten or Kun.
It comforts him to think of his nearly lifelong, familial friendships as incredibly unpleasant for his friends. If he internalises the idea that his friends are vehemently against him opening up, and that they consider the prospect of an emotional heart-to-heart with him as pure torture, then he feels justified in his inclination to cork that bottle shut.
But the ease with which Yuta offers himself up in conversation purifies the air between them, and makes Sicheng want to impress him.
Of course, it’s Ten and Kun who mention all the time Sicheng’s been spending on the phone, enough to cut into his third-wheeling of their dates. Half-concerned (Ten), half-hopeful (Kun), they regard Sicheng apprehensively, like one would a notorious ex-convict who’s just been let out on good behaviour.
As far as Sicheng is concerned, his track record is pretty tame. Johnny was Sicheng’s first boyfriend, and they dated for eight months before the long distance became too much of an inconvenience. By the time they split, they’d made peace with the inevitability. They’d been friends much longer than anything else, and it was easy to return to that. Not much else to say about that first relationship, except that the simplicity of it had drastically warped Sicheng’s expectations of romance. NBD.
His boyfriend after Johnny had broad, almost disproportionate shoulders, and a foot fetish. The narrow entrance up to Sicheng’s apartment was a problem for him. When Sicheng was interning, he’d text Sicheng at least six times a week asking for pictures of his feet. It was hilarious, even when Sicheng found his Twitter account where he posted random closeups of celebrity feet, but only up until grainy, zoomed-in photographs of Sicheng’s own feet started appearing on the page. That lasted four months.
He’d been with The Ex for two years. In retrospect it seems like a long time, but they’d seen each other only a few clandestine hours a week, and the scant moments had stretched into two years. The thrill of cheating ethical code kept them going for a while. It was too easy to get away with it. You get away with it, you take a little more, and then some more, until there’s nothing left to take. And at the end of it, Sicheng had expected to be haunted by two years of memories. Yet, after all that selfishness, all that taking, Sicheng opened his palm to find it strangely empty. The relationship was hollow, built on selfish desire, and Sicheng felt he didn’t miss his ex much at all.
It’s the intimacy he misses.
But this, whatever this is with Yuta, is new for him, too. There’s a lot he’s been fervently compartmentalising lately, storing up the energy then burning it out on the racecourse, concentrating it all into his friendship with Yuta.
“Well, I never. As I live, breathe, and waste away working in this post office where none of my friends ever visit me, here comes one of my friends who never visits me as I waste away working in this post office!” Jungwoo gestures flamboyantly with outstretched arms as Sicheng steps into the tiny building. The two other people inside turn to look at him, and then quickly away when they realise it's the dude who dated his therapist.
“Revisionist history,” Sicheng says as he walks up to the counter. Jungwoo looks prim and proper in his red post office uniform shirt. “You never visit any of us at city hall.”
Jungwoo flicks his hand dismissively. “Whatever. We missed you this week at Cross, by the way.”
“Yeah, sorry, things are pretty hectic at work. Taeil is acting more outlandish than usual trying to get his campaign going. And he’s starting to notice I keep coming in late on Mondays. I just got back from a supply run.”
Jungwoo glances down at the shopping bag in Sicheng’s hand, packed to the brim, where a box of heavy flow Tampax rests atop a jar of coffee. He looks back up into Sicheng’s waiting gaze.
A bout of silence, punctuated by prolonged eye contact.
“They aren’t for me,” Sicheng feels the need to supply. “Obviously.”
Without a word, Jungwoo disappears behind the STAFF ONLY door, and comes back half a minute later with two boxes, one bigger than the other. He hefts them onto the counter in front of Sicheng and starts typing things into his computer. “Anyway, the society that always convenes in the room next to us got locked out. I guess someone stole the key to the room? Anyway, they said fuck it, and sat in with us. It was actually a really cool session. They came up with a lot of interesting clues for the two-way teaser and such. Do you wanna know what their society is?”
Handing Jungwoo the customs fees, Sicheng makes a small noise of disagreement. “No, I told you I want it to be a surprise.”
“Why? Do you want one of the members to tell you? Do you even know any of them? We walk by when their door is open all the time, and you never acknowledge any of them.”
Jungwoo’s stopped typing. He’s looking at Sicheng like Sicheng is holding some nation-building secret.
“What’s with the third degree, geez, I’m on the clock. Not that I care about being punctual for work, but I would really like to leave here.”
“The small box is Taeil’s, big one is yours. Is it another costume for your YouTube videos?”
“I don’t buy the costumes, I make them,” Sicheng huffs, hefting one box under each arm. “That’s like 90% of the videos, do you even support what I do?”
╭╮
Sicheng is in the middle of painstakingly drafting a response to Yuta’s text, when Taeil calls him into the meeting room.
“Okay, party people,” Taeil starts as Sicheng ambles slowly into the room. The space is crowded with government workers from different departments, all gathered awkwardly around a meeting table. “I’m sure you’re all wondering why—”
“I’m not.”
“—Thank you, Sicheng—why these two, nice young people have been filming everything happening around here, and asking you questions,” drumming his fingers excitedly on the desk, Taeil stares into one of the cameras trained in his direction, failing to suppress a smile. “I’ve been keeping it as kind of a surprise until now, and—”
Sicheng tunes out the rest of any and all conversation. He’s trying his best with the text.
(heeey yuta woow u rly thnk id lie 2u) heeey yuta woow u really think i’d lie to you LOL ( stoner for life) sorry to disappoint but its me! I hope ur project goes we
Someone taps him hard on the shoulder. Sicheng looks up. Taeil is saying to the room at large: “—will go through these points I’ve compiled from extremely high to medium relevance while I confer with Miss Jo. Let’s keep the momentum going, until I get back, okay!” This last part he directs at Sicheng with discreetly fierce eye contact, then he breezes out of the room.
Picking up Taeil’s notepad, Sicheng stands up to slouch in front of the white board. He pretends to scan the dozen or so bullet points about government and parks and recreation in neat, cursive handwriting. He says, “Okay, it says here… um,” Sicheng flips through the pages and smooths over a blank one. “It says, ‘would you rather know how to speak fluent French, or lose your virginity? ’ Mark, go!”
A beat of silence, then, from a reluctant Mark Lee from City Planning, “French.”
╭╮
Solving the crypto-quote is much more fun than drawing it up from scratch. The hint they always give with the crypto-quote is quite simple: one letter stands for another. Solving it involves a lot of guesswork and counting letters: JXI might stand for ‘AND’, therefore, JX is ‘AN’ and so forth. One letter stands for another. Isn’t life like that, sometimes?
Sometimes one thing masquerades as something else, but something else it can easily be mistaken for. The trick lies in the decoding, the sharp eye, the powers of deduction. Something Sicheng finds himself asking a lot recently, is, how do we mould the contours of love? At what point can we cleave it from desire? When does it become serious enough, cerebrial enough to be less about the carnal physicality of sex, and to carry more weight in the minutia of falling asleep together, having breakfast together, reading the back half of the newspaper while your lover reads the front, all of this in silence?
For a long time, he thought he knew the answers. But it’s the clichés that cause all the trouble. He’d bought into the dubious fantasy of soulmates and the other half and love as life’s purpose. All you need is love. He’d powered through relationships and brief flings with the temperament of a racehorse. When we yearn to express the inexpressible, we become prisoners of language, prisoners of cliché. Living is the longest job we have, and it is our occupational disease to make metaphor that which we cannot comprehend. One letter stands for another.
Oftentimes Sicheng would set out to make an omelette and what he plated would in fact be some scrambled egg with bits in. Its egg, both ways, and the final products are set apart only by preparation. He hoped one day to find a recipe for the perfect omelette. It seemed silly to be so meticulous about something so trivial—it was egg, either way—and yet he knew it would work. With the recipe he could recognise an omelette for what it was, recognise when it was just in fact, some scrambled eggs with bits in, and have the agency to decide which he preferred in the moment.
(See, in the metaphor above, the omelette represents love, and the scrambled egg with bits stands for desire. The clichés cause the trouble, but Sicheng never claimed to be above them.)
But he decides, then and there, lying on his apartment floor, staring up at the ceiling, that he’s done with the Romantics.
He settles on this:
Heey yuta woow u really think i’d lie to u LOL sorry to disappoint but its me! I hope ur project goes well whats it about? im super busy at work too well thats a lie i try to do as little as possible but my ‘boss’ is trying to become mayor and having a stressful time about it. and my friends who just got engaged have already started planning n roped me in with their plans. ‘loving the earth’ is such an anthropology major thing to say LOL but yes when u sent that msg i was actually in the community garden doing some rounds. we have excellent grapes this season .thanks for watching my video. i guess the jig is up. i hope at least u liked and subscribed (jk) (if the actual owner of this phone reads this msg first 1. thanks for facilitating this unusual thing 2. sorry)
It’s Monday again. It’s always Monday, again. 9ish. Sicheng is lying on the floor of his apartment letting Ten plop blueberries into his mouth intermittently, trying not to choke, high enough to wanna learn how to do geometry. The last time he checked, he had twenty minutes to spare til he had to leave. That’s fine and all, but, considering that initial observation had been made purely on estimating the relative position of the sun, that last time he checked might have been anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour ago.
“Wh’times’it?” Sicheng tries asking, but the words slur together on his tongue.
“Wait, what do you mean, ‘he’s a twunk’?” The pillow under Sicheng’s head moves and he realises it’s Mark Lee. He’s missed a whole chunk of conversation.
Ten affects a disgusted expression. He smacks his lips after a huge slurp of water. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“I’m gonna miss my… thing, you guys, get up,” Sicheng interrupts, even though there is nothing physically preventing him from standing up.
“What?” Ten says.
Sicheng’s phone is vibrating against his shoulder. It’s probably his mom, who calls every Monday morning to instill a fresh bout of week-long filial guilt into her eldest son.
“Who’s ‘Yuta slash Yuta’s friend ’?” Ten asks, peering down at Sicheng’s phone screen.
“Oh’m’gad,” Sicheng scrambles to hit ACCEPT, but when he brings the phone up to his ear he forgets what to say.
“...Sicheng? Are you there? ”
He panics and thrusts the phone into Ten’s hands. The problem is, Ten is holding one of Sicheng’s novelty giant martini glasses with both hands, so he bats the phone away with his knuckles, THC syrup-laced water sloshing over the rim of his glass and soaking into his pants.
“Urrgghhh!” Ten moans. His knee accidentally cuts into Sicheng’s ribs. Sicheng lets out a pitiful, sluggish moan and rolls over.
“ Uh… is this a bad time? ”
“NO,” Sicheng yells into the receiver. He can hear Yuta wincing. “H’lo.”
A soft laugh through the speaker. Yuta sounds like he’s smiling when he says, “ What’s up? ”
“Yeah, fine thanz an urself.”
Yuta guffaws ear-piercingly loud, but the sound makes Sicheng smile, anyway. “Are you high? It’s so early, ” then, voice laced with something like knowing , Yuta continues, “ You must have nowhere to be.”
“Whuzz’t,” meaning, what’s the time?
“I’m actually on my way somewhere. Hey, I hadn’t gotten a chance to tell you, I stumbled on a cool society at college you would like. Wanna hear? ”
Sicheng rolls away from Mark and knocks his knee against one of the coffee table legs. The long groan he lets out must sound like ‘yes’, because Yuta takes it as incentive to continue.
“It’s called ‘ Cross: the Puzzling Society ’ and they make up clues and solve puzzles like crosswords and stuff. It’s very cool, I even helped out with some. It’s open to people who aren’t even enrolled, too. ”
Yuta sounds again, like he’s wearing a wide smile. Knowing.
“So, yeah. The society meets up in the same building mine does. In the next room, actually. Strange. I’ve always seen people going in there, but I never knew what for. One day, actually, a while ago, I saw this guy who looked kind of familiar. And I remember: I’ve seen him before, on the day I signed up for this society. I was checking out all the societies at their little tents, when I saw this guy across the plaza. Tall guy, in a wool jacket. Pinkish-brownish hair. Beanie tucked behind his ears. Easily the most stunning person I’ve ever seen.
So I try walking over, no gameplan, just trying to part the crowd of freshmen like Moses. Meanwhile Tall Guy is leaning over to scribble onto a page and he leaves the tent. I rush over there like it's a note he’s left for me. But I got confused, I couldn’t remember which society he’d signed up to, and I didn’t know his name, so, on a whim, I chose the tent on the right. Guess what? Wrong tent. A week later I get an email telling me I’m signed up to a society about romance novels. I study Anthropology. Anyway, so I show up on Monday, late, and I’m nearly run over by this dude zipping past me to the room next door. Pinkish-brownish hair. I guess he was late, too. ”
With the weight and rigidity of a simple room door, Sicheng’s tongue crowds up his mouth, lax to any instructions of movement.
“So, yeah, ” Yuta continues, not in the least phased by Sicheng’s silence. There’s rustling of movement in the background, like fabric glancing off fabric, like he’s walking. “ That’s where I’m going.”
Sicheng lifts up onto his elbows and forces his mouth to move around the words: “Wha’time’izit,”
Ten rolls his eyes and snatches Sicheng’s phone out of his hand to check the time on the screen, a nifty little idea that just occurs to him.
“Chill. It’s 9:30.”
“Oh,” Sicheng collapses back onto the floor. His eyes fall shut.
“I’m fucking with you, it’s literally 10.”
Sicheng jumps up, stumbles several feet in the general direction of the front door before realising he now has to tug on and lace up his shoes. He jams his feet into Ten’s flip flops instead, grabs a pair of blue tinted sunglasses off the key hooks, and sprints out the door.