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Gakbyul opens his eyes in the second-from-last bed in the overnight room. He squints, yawns, and thinks, Fuck this.
It is not an unusual thought. In fact, he’s thought this every single morning of his working life, which now compromises over half of it. It’s a little early to be feeling this old, but Gakbyul’s nothing if not contrary.
The overnight room is empty save himself, as usual. Most folks choose the undignified schlep back home over sticking it out at the station. Ask Gakbyul, he’d say that’s stupid. Save an hour each way for commute, spend it on getting some good quality sleep in a bed you don’t have to change the sheets on. Sounds like a steal to him.
Gakbyul rolls unceremoniously out of bed, slogs across the hall to the showers, peers foggily into the mirror as he rinses out his mouth. The face that stares back appears as it ever does: long and pointy, flat uninterested eyes, eyebrows that take up 30% of the real estate. He presents all of his teeth to the glass for inspection. The resultant expression makes the junior officer coming in flinch into a shower stall.
“Hey there, Philip,” muffles Gakbyul. “At ease.”
“Good morning, Assistant Inspector,” says Philip, sounding doubtful. Gakbyul breezes past him before the junior officer can ask any inconvenient questions about Gakbyul’s health and wellness.
The station, downstairs, is coming alive. Printers chugging, the aircon wheezing laboriously. A fine film of sweat is starting to collect on the nape of Gakbyul’s neck. He gathers his hair into a tail with one hand, accepting Junior Officer Titi’s enthusiastic paper cup of coffee with the other, and sails into the Mysterious Crime Squad office just in time for Inspector Jamtteul to finish, “—to Assistant Inspector Gakbyul.”
“Speak of the tiger and he shall appear!” Gongryong turns fully around, his arms slung over the back of his chair. “Morning, Assistant Inspector.”
Gakbyul rounds the corner to his own desk without bothering to reply; he knows, from experience, that Gongryong can very well entertain himself. Sure enough, Gongryong’s toothy grin stretches wider, and he says slyly, “What’s up, Assistant Inspector? Not even a witty quip about arriving later than me?”
“Technically Assistant Inspector Gakbyul was here earlier than all of us.” Duckgae, who refuses to pass up an opportunity to rag on Gongryong if he can help it. Unfortunately, he always forgets that Gongryong can both take and dish it.
“What, ‘cause he never left last night? Semantics, my dear hoobae. All up for debate! If you wanted to hash the technicalities of getting to work on time you only had to ask.”
“I did not ask,” sputters Duckgae, backpedaling wildly. Across from him, Rathar leans back in his chair and sighs heavily through his nose.
“You never learn,” he tells Duckgae.
“Because he’s impossible to teach!”
“What! I take offense to that! I’ll have you know I’m a delight to have as a student, I’m an academic sponge! An academic weapon.”
Gakbyul catches himself mouthing along to each word. He shuts himself up with a gulp of scalding coffee, sensing the gaze that snags on the side of his face.
“—copied Inspector Jamtteul’s profiling manual. Down to the letter, I’ll have you know! Wouldn’t you say so, Inspector?”
“I would say,” Inspector Jamtteul intones, sweeping her eyes dispassionately over Gongryong’s glittering smile, Rathar’s raised eyebrows, and Duckgae’s head down on his desk, “that all of you are completely off-task. Assistant Inspector Gakbyul, I’m assigning you to the dabang on Haeram-ro for today. I’d like you to go over the part-timers’ alibis one more time before we wrap up.”
“Do Juhyeon and Choi Wooram?” asks Gakbyul. His mouth is bitter and black.
“Correct. Choi Wooram especially. Do you remember the receipt we found last night?”
The chickenscratch scrawl is engraved, like stone etchings, into the back of his head. Without thinking he recites, “‘00:15. Usual place. No more hiding,’” and has to play it off by dumping most of his coffee onto himself when Inspector Jamtteul turns to give him a significant look.
“Aw, hell,” he says into the instant uproar.
“Water!” Duckgae slops most of it onto Gakbyul’s shirt, but it’s the thought that counts. He has two seconds to look mortified before Rathar sweeps him kindly but firmly out of the way and all but strips the clothes off Gakbyul’s back.
Each day presents a novel struggle. Today, Gakbyul is half-naked in the office with a reddening shoulder, rolling his eyes to the ceiling, and a hand is falling to his arm, a towel, cold.
Like a mouthful of fresh air, his seat neighbor says, “Assistant Inspector.”
Gakbyul takes the towel and presses it to his face. “Thanks, Rabbit Ears,” he says, and he does not look at Suhyeon at all.
On the second day he sat up and said What the fuck, very loudly, at the opposing wall. He sat there so long that Junior Officer Philip came in and looked surprised and asked him what he was doing up, he thought the assistant inspector would be with the squad by now, it was already twenty after eight. He stumbled out of the door and down the stairs and shambled into the office on newborn deer legs. Everyone saw him, stood up. The sound of a slamming door tripped an upright reflex in all of them but this was different, it was because he was heaving with his shirt all crinkled and his hair a mess. Duckgae asked tremulously where his necktie was and he said, We were in the hospital, we were in the— what the fuck is going on, and ripped his arm from Inspector Jamtteul when she tried to touch him. That got Rathar’s back up, reaching out as if to draw Inspector Jamtteul away, but he was already moving on, clearing the office to the only person who hadn’t crowded for him when he’d barged in.
Assistant Inspector Gakbyul? said Suhyeon, his eyes big and limpid. He skimmed his hands over Suhyeon’s shoulders, down his arms, and couldn’t do anything as inane as touch. One of Suhyeon’s long white ears flicked and he said, quieter, Assistant Inspector Gakbyul.
The most terrible fucking dream, he told Suhyeon, and dropped his hands to his sides, his knees sinking to the floor, his whole pitiful body folding under the weight. Suhyeon sucked in a hard breath and knelt before him and said his name and title again, but really all that got through was the adamantine clarity of utter and total relief, the relief of a cold beer after a sweltering summer day, the relief of slipping between the closing doors of a departing train, the relief of a seatbelt garroting you to your seat as a freight truck roars past. He could bottle that relief and drown his lungs in it.
Take the day off, ordered Inspector Jamtteul brusquely. She so often spoke like that, without room for argument. Not one to suffer fools, Inspector Jamtteul. Go back upstairs and rest. We’ll fetch you for the briefing in the evening.
No, I’m fine, he said, and meant it. The dregs of the bad dream had slipped off his spine with a final whisper, and the cold sweat was only a clinging afterthought, and Suhyeon’s fingertips were light on his arms. One rough night won’t kill me. It’s not a big deal, Inspector. Sorry for the fuss.
Inspector Jamtteul said, after a moment of deliberation, If you’re sure, and he said, I’m sure, and she said, Then the dabang, with Assistant Inspector Suhyeon.
A shroud of deja vu all day, after that. He recalled verbatim Do Juhyeon’s longwinded excuse for why he had locked up a half hour earlier than he was meant to on the day of the murder, but it, too, had the wavering heatwave quality of a childhood trip. He took rambling notes in the margins of the incident report and listened to Suhyeon dissect the stumbling sentences of Do Juhyeon, then Choi Wooram. He nodded gravely along as Inspector Jamtteul fit all the clues together neatly along the seams, and when she dismissed them, he gamely ignored the ominous cramp of foreboding in his belly and told Suhyeon, See you tomorrow, Rabbit Ears.
Suhyeon tipped his head and said, See you tomorrow, Assistant Inspector Gakbyul. Then he blinked, that calm level lamplike gaze, and said, Is something the matter?
Nothing. Just deja vu. Because Suhyeon had said the same yesterday, or rather in his dream, and he was still half-sleepwalking through the hideousness of it. Go on.
Suhyeon shifted his bag to his other hip. He looked at him for the longest moment.
Suhyeon said, Okay, sunbae, and the office door clicked quietly behind him.
He gathered his coat and his keys and shuffled out, concluding that the overnight room had supremely bad vibes and this was an abject lesson in work-life balance. He lived far enough away that the landline was ringing by the time he unlocked the door. A weekday night, whoever was voice-phishing at this hour, and he muttered curses as he picked up the phone.
Is this Kim Gakbyul-ssi? said the woman on the other end, and he felt all the hairs on his arms rise.
Speaking, he said numbly.
This is Seonghwa General Hospital. I’m calling because you are listed as the emergency contact for Hwang Suhyeon-ssi. He was admitted an hour ago.
The woman paused. She seemed to expect him to say something.
Do you know the address? she asked finally, when the silence stretched too long for even her to ignore. He’s in urgent care… he’s in a bad way.
The dabang’s cramped, dark entryway opens into a lavish sitting room, filigreed armchairs and sofas arranged at tastefully careless angles, with faux velvet that shimmers in the low lamplight, the earthy smell of good coffee perfuming the room. At the back wall spins a blues record, and hung up everywhere are Polaroid photos of all kinds — friends, couples, young families, grandmothers and grandfathers, the manager, the employees, candids and self-captures and painstaking portraits, all piling together into a claustrophobic panopticon of strained domesticity within which to question suspects.
“You’re twenty-six, Wooram-ssi,” says Suhyeon pleasantly. “I assumed you haven’t served yet?”
“Oh, um. I— I got back a few months ago, actually. All my friends went at the same time, so. I just thought I’d go too.”
“They sound like good friends. I imagine you all kept in touch, then?”
“Yeah, for sure. We talked all the time. Juhyeon actually hooked me up with this gig,” says Choi Wooram. His face opens like a springtime flower, rosy and youthful — and then he hears himself, and his own enthusiasm, and his complexion drains of color.
Out of the corner of his eye Gakbyul can see the sidelong shape of his hoobae sitting very straight, but with his ears tucked softly over his shoulders like pigtails. He’s only half-following the conversation, he’s heard it all before, but it still sends a prickle down the rungs of his spine when Suhyeon says, almost gently, “I didn’t know you and Juhyeon-ssi were so close.”
“Oh. Uh. I, uh—”
“Juhyeon-ssi gave me the impression that you two met for the first time while working here. Was that not the case? I don’t mean to assume.”
“He said that? I mean—”
“Yes, when we spoke the very first time. He mentioned that you were a good coworker — detail-oriented — but that you were a bit standoffish. I believe the word he used was ‘cold’.”
Choi Wooram bristles. With a scoff just barely bordering on nonchalant, he says, “That’s rich coming from him.”
The scratch of Suhyeon’s pen quits altogether. A sixth sense beyond any natural reckoning, honed from years and years of unmentioned history, cues Gakbyul to the way Suhyeon leans conspiratorially in. That, and Gakbyul has the choreography of this whole scene memorized down to the jammed left drawer in one of the decorative bureaus.
“Is he really so disingenuous? I confess, I’ve never thought the same, but he’s so well-known by the regulars…”
“No, he just says stuff like this sometimes, I dunno. He gets, like, jealous, and takes it out on everybody else, you know? He’s been working here so long, but he’s still only part-time and he lives on his own, no girlfriend or anything.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. And he doesn’t even show up to shifts on time lately. Last week…”
Gakbyul lets the conversation drift out of focus. He has his part, and Suhyeon has his, unscripted as they are. Anchored distantly to the sounds of his hoobae drawing an entirely new confession out of the stupid kid with a chip on his shoulder, Gakbyul spirits the wads of bloody napkins out of the jammed drawer and into his pockets.
On the fifth day he cinched his necktie tightly around his collar and strode into the office with a pep in his step that felt so foreign it looped back into natural, like the paradox of a body warming itself. He gave everyone a chipper good morning, and everyone looked at him like he’d tap-danced in.
Assistant Inspector, are you feeling alright, asked Gongryong, because he possessed the winning combination of nosiness and balls.
He said, Yeah, why, and everyone listened respectfully as Inspector Jamtteul rattled off their assignments for the day.
As they dispersed, a hand found the inner crook of his elbow. All too familiar and somehow intimate a motion, and only he had initiated such touch before, so he was appropriately flabbergasted, brows to the ceiling and everything, as Suhyeon murmured, You aren’t acting like yourself.
He said, How is that even possible? I’m always myself. Ergo, I’m always acting like myself.
Hmm, said Suhyeon.
Rabbit Ears, if you’re gonna be a nuisance, at least be a nuisance in the car.
Hmmmm, said Suhyeon, in a tone that made even the hardest of convicts quit dicking around.
It had never really worked on him. He rolled his eyes and ushered Suhyeon into shotgun, and spent the entire fifteen-minute ride thinking of another way. Suhyeon perched on a sofa in the dabang like his body had been made to perch on deceptively expensive furniture, nocking one steel-tipped question after another at the two sweating part-timers, and he thought about how to trick him out of leaving. He could recruit Gongryong, if Gongryong were not so wily and so damn nosy. Duckgae and Rathar were both liable to spill if pressed, and there was no way in hell Inspector Jamtteul would go along with a game like this. She would want the truth, and she would have it, one way or another. She was untouchable.
After the briefing, after the final assignment, after the papers were cleared away and plans were being made for dinner, he grabbed Suhyeon’s arm and said, The new soondae place down by the market. Come on.
Suhyeon looked at him oddly and said, I don’t particularly care for soondae, but thank you, Assistant Inspector Gakbyul. Another time, and fit his arms into his sand-colored coat.
Not soondae — a pocha, then. Come on, Rabbit Ears, come on. Just one drink. Keep me company, come on.
Suhyeon lifted his eyes from the dark brown buttons on his coat, and now the confusion was muddled with exasperation. Another time, sunbae.
Rabbit Ears—
Assistant Inspector, Suhyeon interrupted sharply, I promise you I’ll go anywhere you like, just not tonight. I have a previous engagement. Please be reasonable. And he whirled, his coat flaring like the tailfeathers of a bird, and he shut the door hard behind him.
He watched, lips pressed together. The call came, from the hospital, forty minutes later, to the office, empty of everyone save himself.
At the briefing, Gakbyul produces the napkins to much disgust. Gongryong makes exaggerated gagging noises and Inspector Jamtteul wrinkles her nose, but Duckgae — as Gakbyul had hoped once, and as he expects now — reaches unmoored fingers out to touch the crumpled ball of red and white in Gakbyul’s hand. His eyelids flicker, just a suggestion of pupil and iris, and he says calmly, “Two… maybe three people used these. One earlier than the next two.” A chorus of whispers shrouds him like a cloak. Gakbyul forces himself to stay completely still. “The blood smells familiar. Like the crime scene. The hands — they’re coffee hands. One more like metal.” Duckgae’s lashes flutter again. He sways in place, then says, sounding more like his usual self-conscious self, “That is, uh, I think— my spirits, they, uh, say it’s probably some of the dabang workers.”
Inspector Jamtteul has already stood back to take in their entire chalkboard, filled top to bottom with individual pages from the incident report and coffee grounds gathered secretly from behind the counter and a grainy photograph of the murder weapon and a plastic glove holding a bloodstained earring. She makes a thoughtful noise free of consonants, and the temperature in the office ticks down one, maybe two degrees.
“It has to be those two guys, then,” says Rathar, tapping the tip of his pencil on his copy of the report. “What’re their names. Do Juhyeon and Choi Wooram. They had the strongest motives, too, remember the notes we found on the CD cover yesterday?”
“In their defense, it was a pretty great way to hide love letters. Who’s listening to trot from the forties anymore?”
“A crime of passion,” suggests Suhyeon softly. He’s been sitting closer to Gakbyul than he usually does. It’s been a real, real long time since he went out of his way to do that, probably going on a decade. Gakbyul can feel the weight of his presence as surely as if Suhyeon were sitting on him. That might be less obtrusive, at this point.
Inspector Jamtteul grunts. “Jealousy… it fits the profile. Go Yoonmi was not murdered premeditatively. And those napkins are from the dispenser at the dabang, and furthermore were hidden in the dabang. Alright, then. Does anyone have anything to add before we wrap up for tonight?”
The whole room perks up so fast you’d never know they’d been wilted to begin with. “Hweshik,” begins Gongryong with glee, only for a look from Gakbyul’s left to silence him unceremoniously.
“Choi Wooram took me into his confidence earlier,” Suhyeon reports. His voice is reamed of particles, of matter. “He claimed Do Juhyeon was jealous of his work; he began to say that Do Juhyeon was jealous of his relationship with the victim, as well, but held his tongue at the last minute. I also want to point out the detail of the meeting time. 00:15 is written in army time.”
Gongryong snaps his fingers, dinner forgotten in an instant in the face of puzzle pieces snapping perfectly together. “You’re right! Didn’t you say Do Juhyeon and Choi Wooram both finished their military service?”
“Choi Wooram more recently, but yes. And it seems that they’ve known one another for quite some time.”
The chalkboard rattles against Inspector Jamtteul’s rapped knuckles. “That’s an important detail, Assistant Inspector Suhyeon. Thank you. Alright,” she announces, sweeping her arms out, “enough for today. Go home. Get some rest. We finish this tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am,” ringing around the room. Chairs scraping in, coats and gloves collected from the hooks by the door. Gakbyul lingers for a moment, squaring his papers, studying his nails, and after a careful pause a hand ghosts over his shoulder.
“Assistant Inspector Gakbyul? Are you leaving?”
“In a sec.”
“You aren’t doing anything.”
“You don’t know that, Rabbit Ears. There’s a soju bottle with my name on it at the pocha, if you really gotta know.”
“It’s only Tuesday, Assistant Inspector.”
“Don’t nag me.”
Another brief, careful pause.
“You haven’t looked at me once all day, Assistant Inspector.”
Gakbyul folds his nails into the meat of his palm. “No,” he agrees. “No, I have not.”
“Have I done something wrong?” asks Suhyeon.
His voice is softer now, the unbearable sort. The underbelly-of-a-small-animal sort. He only ever sounds that way with intention, to prove a point, to reel out a confession, his every minuscule movement a weapon and a purpose. He rarely sounds like that anymore; that he does now is a giving of ground.
What are we even doing here, Gakbyul wonders.
“Sunbae,” says Suhyeon.
On the fourteenth day it was finally no longer a joke or a nightmare. He had seen a dozen configurations of his hoobae’s face in filth and bone and each time was a fresh hell. He’d coerced Gongryong into dragging Suhyeon out for dinner afterward, recruited Rathar to cajole Suhyeon into the gym upstairs, and none of it meant a goddamn thing. Suhyeon slipped away, more fool him for thinking the kids would be any match for Suhyeon, and then it would be the same day all over again, the morning of the night that Suhyeon would walk out of the station and never come back.
On the fourteenth day something steel and unyielding in him creaked under the nameless strain and he stormed out of the station with his hair undone and he gunned it all the way to the dabang and he grabbed Choi Wooram by the scruff and shook him ‘til change came out. It’s you, isn’t it, he roared, completely unlike himself, hurled off the cuff with rabid abandon. You kill him. You kill him.
I don’t know what you mean, I don’t know what you’re talking about, please lemme go, Choi Wooram wailed haplessly, but he hadn’t missed the cunning glint in this particular suspect’s eye the last time he’d been here with Suhyeon, the way his mouth folded up when Suhyeon pressed the same points he’d pressed all thirteen times they’d been here together. He wasn’t Suhyeon with his silver tongue and unflinching gaze but when you see someone thirteen times, when you sit in the same fucking room thirteen fucking times and hit the same fucking details every — fucking — time —
It was impossible not to notice how the scene strutted identically by, down to the bend of Choi Wooram’s brows. It was impossible not to leap frantically to conclusions in the violent hope that this time, this time, he would do it right. He would do right by Suhyeon, and he would not see him in a hospital bed, facedown in a ditch, head caved in like a bad moon, mouth freckled with blood, aborted pain taking flight from his body. He would do it right this time, he would do everything.
On the fourteenth day they put him in a cell to cool his head, Inspector Jamtteul and Rathar and Gongryong and the rest. That night they came to him with eyes like bowls of water and said, It’s Assistant Inspector Suhyeon, and he put his face into his hands.
He said, I’ll never forgive any of you, because Suhyeon was not there to call him a hypocrite.
“You’ve never done anything wrong,” Gakbyul lies.
“Don’t be obtuse, sunbae,” replies Suhyeon immediately, unimpressed.
Gakbyul chances a slow upward glance. The details of Suhyeon are, as they’ve ever been, imperfectly legible: the crisp lines of his slacks and suspenders, the casual hand he drapes over the strap of his work bag. If he had even a fraction of Suhyeon’s ability he’d read him like a damn manual; as it is Gakbyul only really understands the pins and locks in Suhyeon’s expressions, discrete components that create his interiority.
Now he knows these limbs as a scattershot collection strewn over a street, and knows what they look like hooked to a dozen beeping machines in a white wheeled cot. Hilariously, he’d thought he’d known. He’d thought he’d seen it all.
The problem, thinks Gakbyul, studying his hoobae from the neck down. The problem is that he has never had any success lying to Suhyeon. He might be the one person in the world Suhyeon never lets slide. They’ve promised nothing in so many words, but oaths hardly matter when they’ve scraped one another out of their lowests. To know another person by the demons they drag after their heels is a whole new category of vulnerability. Sometimes, if Gakbyul is completely clean with himself, it feels like they’re putting a gun in one another’s hands.
Thirty days of trying, and trying, and trying, because Suhyeon won’t fall for it. Because he knows Gakbyul too well to accept a lie, and trusts him too much to permit the truth.
“You know I’d do anything,” Gakbyul says, and doesn’t finish the sentence. As he has every day for the past thirty days, he can feel the weight of Suhyeon’s eyes like fingers on his face.
Suhyeon sounds too close when he says, “Then you should tell me the truth.”
On the twenty-ninth day he didn’t leave the bed.
Junior Officer Philip came in, sounded surprised that he was still there, Assistant Inspector Gakbyul, Assistant Inspector? Are you alright? and he did not answer him.
Then came the others, Duckgae first like the bleeding heart he is. I heard you feeling, he began, then bit his lip, then tried again, I heard you feeling bad from downstairs, Assistant Inspector Gakbyul. Are you…
Inspector Jamtteul was less circumspect. Get out of bed, Assistant Inspector Gakbyul. We need you, she said. When he didn’t move, she softened impossibly.
Tell me what’s wrong, she said, and he could not.
Gongryong didn’t have to ask. He poked his head in, scanned him critically, and said, Tomorrow? Tomorrow, answering himself, somehow understanding everything, and simultaneously none of it at all.
Rathar, in a moment of misplaced but genuine kindness, pulled the sheets over him as if he were an invalid, or Rathar’s grandmother. He patted him over the sheets and said, his voice terribly earnest, Please let us know if you need anything, Assistant Inspector. Okay? We’re here for you.
He couldn’t have swallowed under threat of torture, in that moment. Right, he croaked instead, and Rathar, satisfied, withdrew.
He didn’t remember falling asleep, but he did remember startling awake to Gongryong’s drawn, gray face. Let me guess, he’d said, his voice gravelled.
Gongryong said, It’s Assistant Inspector Suhyeon.
He said, Yeah. I know.
I’ll get to it tomorrow.
Gakbyul lifts his eyes to Suhyeon’s face.
Massive yellow eyes, heavy with worry. His cheekbone whole and unsmashed, puffed out by the pressure of his pursed mouth. There’s a dark lock springing out of his otherwise tamed hair, and his ears hover over his shoulders, apprehensive, urgent. His gaze rakes over Gakbyul, over and over, without so much as a flicker of violet indicating nefarious intent. He’s here, whole, alive, unharmed, unbelievable, beautiful for all of it.
“Stay.”
Suhyeon freezes. He blinks rapidly, four or five times in succession. His left hand darts up to join the other on the strap of his bag. They cling together like frightened children.
“Stay,” Gakbyul says again. “Stay here. Please.”
It’s not the truth. It’s barely half of it. He’s not holding back on purpose, he doesn’t even think of it. But the notion of pouring out the month he’s spent writhing futilely, of spilling forth his failure to do by Suhyeon all he’s ever wished to do — he’s a coward, really. Just a coward with everything to lose.
It is a truth, though. It might be the first time he’s said as such all month.
“Stay,” Gakbyul says.
The bag slides slowly off of Suhyeon’s shoulder. He sinks into the seat beside Gakbyul, not usually his but Gongryong’s, and it squeaks in protest as he wheels himself closer. His knees knock against Gakbyul’s in some pale imitation of a kids’ playground game.
“Okay, sunbae,” says Suhyeon. His hand falls easily to Gakbyul’s second and third knuckles. “I’ll stay.”