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.