Friday evening, a group dinner for the Department of Neuroscience in the College of Life Sciences.

Inside the narrow, greasy restaurant. The smell of grilling meat and the acrid smoke made noses and mouths feel stale. The sound of people’s laughter gradually lost its reason as time went by and swelled up grotesquely. Orum sat at the very end in a corner, quietly filling out the headcount like a sack of barley that had been borrowed and placed there. Since tenured professors, assistants, and graduate students had all turned out, for Orum, a non-tenure-track lecturer, the word “absence” had never been an option in the first place.

Fearing someone might ask if his side dish plate was too clean, Orum absentmindedly moved a few pieces of food around with his chopsticks. The meat that went into his mouth felt like a mineral with no texture or taste at all, and his stomach had already hardened like stone from tension.

It was not simply a place to eat dinner and that was that. It was a survival test repeated every semester. Lecture assignments, lab access permissions, even the meager administrative support funds were all at the mercy of the generous discretion of tenured professors. At the very bottom of power, Orum had to rush out whenever they called.

Especially for a young lecturer like Orum, the dinner was a kind of “entertainment,” and if he failed to make an impression here, next semester’s livelihood might be cut off. He was nothing more than a nameless part that could be swapped out at any time inside this vast pyramid of hierarchy.

On top of that, Orum had another motive he could not bring himself to tell others. A lingering hope, mixed with delusion, that maybe Yunhyeok would appear at this boring gathering. He did not want to see him, and yet the contradictory desire to see even his back gnawed at one corner of Orum’s chest like mold.

But Yunhyeok did not come. Contrary to Orum’s miserable expectations, he had no reason at all to be here. As the son-in-law of the university president and an academic nobleman who had been appointed associate professor at breakneck speed, missing a department dinner like this would not leave even the slightest stain on him.

Orum filled his glass once more, painfully realizing again that the person he was waiting for had never existed on the same plane as him.

He normally never touched alcohol, but today he had to keep emptying his glass with a smile on his face. One sip, then another. The alcohol he was forced to swallow soon coursed through his blood vessels. It felt as if his brain was swelling like wet cotton. His vision wavered. The fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling flashed brilliantly like fish scales. The people’s voices sounded like heavy echoes coming from underwater. A wave of anemia rolled in.

I don’t want to be a burden.

This pathological obsession with cleanliness that ruled Orum woke up the last bit of reason he had left. He quietly stood up, using going to the restroom as an excuse. When he opened the old emergency exit in the corner of the restaurant and stepped out, the cold night air clawed at his flushed cheeks. The remnants of winter, in contrast to the damp, foul indoor air, stabbed deep into his lungs, but thanks to that, he felt his twisted stomach calm a little.

At times like this, he always thought of Somi. If it were her, she would surely have gently rubbed Orum’s back and told him not to push himself. Orum took out his mobile phone. For the first time, he was going to send a message first to Somi, who always reached out to him before he ever worked up the courage himself.

Just as he was finding Somi’s number and about to press the message button, a group came into view from the diagonally opposite corner.

There were boys and girls. And there was Eom Ita. Thanks to his exceptionally tall height and solid build, his presence was overwhelming. Orum put his phone away again. He saw them talking noisily among themselves with their faces buried in their scarves. Along with the cigarette smoke they were blowing out, fragments of conversation rode the wind and reached Orum’s ears.

Oppa was insane today with the deal angle. I had five solo kills. If it had gone like this in the last team fight, our darling would have hit Grandmaster ages ago. A girl burst into a giggle at Ita’s slick words. Another boy fired back and sneered.

“What are you saying, that bastard Eom Ita is a pure carry addict from the start.”

Even that seemed amusing to Ita, who wore an easy smile on his lips. They seemed to be talking about the game. Since they called someone darling, was one of them his girlfriend?

Ita seemed to have a talent for lifting the mood around him and drawing people in at will. It was a kind of inborn brilliance and vitality that Orum could search for until the day he died and still never find in himself.

Orum once again felt keenly that he was an outsider through and through. The professor society crushed by hierarchy, the students overflowing with youth and idle chatter, he did not fit anywhere.

At that moment, Ita suddenly lifted his head and looked toward Orum.

More than the startled Orum, for some reason Ita was the first to look away from him. He lowered his eyes again as if nothing had happened and continued talking with his friends. Time dragged on sluggishly. The sight of those eyes, which had been fixed on Orum, slowly hidden by his eyelashes, looked to Orum like a scene in a movie playing in slow motion.

The students who had finished their cigarettes went back into the restaurant in a rush. No one there greeted Orum. Now only Ita remained alone across from him. He had one leg bent, bracing himself against the wall, and was smoking. Orum closed his eyes so as not to be aware of Ita. Then, borrowing the steep rise of his drunkenness, he called up the “garden” in his mind.

The garden distorted by intoxication was indistinct and faint like a hallucination. It was a space where the boundary between reality and shadow had collapsed. The leaves rustled without any wind, and the moon hanging in the sky gave off a grim light.

The hornbeam standing firm in the middle of the garden looked lifeless. Its branches, wrapped in dry bark, looked like a human anatomy illustration in which all the blood and flesh had drained away, leaving only the nerves.

Suddenly the grass beneath the hornbeam stirred. A single red dot was rolling aimlessly between the blades of grass. It looked like the aiming point of a sniper who had come to destroy the garden, and it also looked like a falling drop of blood. Orum stared blankly, following the dot’s path. The dot, which had been moving around all over, suddenly stopped in one place.

Thud.

The sound of reality tore into Orum’s hallucination. Orum opened his eyes. Ita was crushing the burning end of the cigarette with the tip of his shoe. The red flame went out with a soft sizzle on the cement floor. We must not run into each other. Steadying his swaying body, Orum hurriedly turned around and grabbed the emergency exit door handle.

But before he could even reach out, strong arms suddenly wrapped around Orum’s waist. It was Ita. Orum rose slightly into the air, then was roughly turned around toward his chest. Heat that contrasted with the cold. Ita grinned.

“You’re drunk.”

No, he had to say.

Ita was too close. Everything around him went distant. In an instant, gravity disappeared. Darkness fell over Orum. Orum’s memory broke off there, with the last thing he remembered being Ita’s gaze while holding him.

***

Orum’s house had a stripped-down layout. A living room visible right from the entrance, a mini kitchen attached beside it like a comma, and one bedroom. On one side of the living room was a bookshelf packed full of books and papers. A few empty water bottles rolled around the sink.

Sleep and go to work, sleep and go to work again. It was the kind of home anyone could see and know the person living there lived that way. A non-tenure-track lecturer could not support a household. After Yunhyeok’s breakup notice, the money he had saved little by little while going to the hospital also ran out. So Orum had been struggling up until now without even getting proper rest.

The first thing he recognized was a voice. Some intelligent woman’s voice. Orum immediately realized he was dreaming. Blood circulated in the order of his legs, chest, then head. Orum lifted his head and looked toward the source of the voice.

Orum was sitting in front of a TV. Even though he knew there was no TV in his house, he kept staring at the screen. A woman was conducting an interview on the screen. The flagship anchor of the public broadcasting news panel. Sophisticated, neat, and beautiful. When the woman looked straight ahead, an alarm so loud it seemed to tear his ears rang out. Orum clenched his teeth so he would not scream.

Joo Yunhyeok’s wife.

To Orum, her beauty served only to emphasize the sorrow and misery inside himself. Yunhyeok had been cruel to the end. The wife he had chosen after abandoning Orum was so perfect. Orum could not even dare to feel wronged. It was empty.

Orum woke up in pain as if stabbed by a knife. A dark but familiar room. His own bedroom. His heart was pounding so fast that it hurt. He still had the sensation that someone had lifted and moved his body.

First, his glasses. Let me find my glasses first. With his brow tightly furrowed, Orum groped around near him. Suddenly a voice came again. This time it was a low, rough man’s voice.

“What are you looking for? Want water?”

Orum gasped and nearly fainted. Blinking nonstop, he checked the side and saw Ita standing there with his arms crossed.

“I haven’t even finished looking around your place. Sleep a little more.”

Eom Ita in my house. That is, in a place Orum had not permitted, at a position he had not permitted, in an attitude he had not permitted. His tone was astonishingly calm. Orum tried to get up somehow, but his body would not listen. Of all people, to be in this state in front of Eom Ita, this was the extension of a nightmare. The fact that Ita had dragged him home while drunk was humiliating in itself, and at the same time Orum found it strangely astonishing that this face could say he was not afraid of anything at all.