These Sainted Seouls | ongoing

section ten: Na-kyu

She woke up with a sick mix of flavors inside her; he could hide it, sometimes, but she was inside his head and she felt everything. Saint Servera was supposed to be segregated: an entirely separate mind palace, not bound to the dark channels of his suppressed emotions or to the psychotic ticking things that ran the rest of his mind. It was supposed to be a world apart, with her in the center of it, waiting for him like the maiden she was.

But it never really worked out that way. He had minimal control--his anger and depression would still drift into the city like a smog. That was why she could wake up and stand at the window and know that he was suicidal (again) and that it was even worse this time, as it always was worse than the time before.

Na-kyu slammed her fist into the window-glass. He was alone and in reality; she was a fiction, and also alone, though she would halve the universe for a chance to be with him.

"Why is he not coming," she whispered to the air. "Why isn't he coming back to me? If it's this bad--this is why I'm here, after all--"

The glowing city had no answers. It ran out before her, silver and dusted with snow and somehow still in full floral bloom, her jonquils and roses and chrysanthemums and ivy vines dripping from the window boxes of her apartment and into the streets below. Their apartment, really, though he had been coming back to her less and less. She imagined that it took some fortitude for him to become Lee Na-Sung, because that man was more or less a persona, and always the real man was out there, existing in Seoul as someone rich and broken and untouchable. Maybe he was tired of the double-life: redeeming himself in his head with a green fantasy of a girl and then having to go back to the surface of his consciousness, time and time again, to realize that nothing had really changed.

Na-kyu went slowly through the rooms; she kept things mostly white and pale pink, offsetting concrete with softly blossoming daisies and wildflowers and looping Queen Anne's Lace and purple-weed flowers around china vases and necessary art, all the carpets like satin and the apartment always clean. He had let her decorate it: there were places in the city where she could buy things, money an invisible transaction that came at no expense to her, and there were fields beyond the highrises where she would pick her flowers. Some came from her garden, too. He had been determined to make Saint Servera as beautiful as possible for her and he had done well: the city was always a frothy paradise, hovering between the fantastical and the known, just ordinary enough to appease the parts of her that knew what such a place ought to look like. If she looked out the kitchen window there were hints of Paris and Tokyo; going into the bedroom, it was purely Seoul, looking even more realistic with a thick grey in the air that was his mental depression falling accidentally into the city.

She sat down on the mattress and knotted her hands into the sheets. The bed always felt empty when she woke up alone; they were not properly married because a deep part of her was a mental figment, and the immorality of it bothered her. They had sex often, but she thought it did not feel as sacred it should because there was no metal band over her finger, and no altar promises and church orchids to keep as virgins in her memory. He had envisioned her as someone pure and she was, but the double-life was dirtying her. It was worse when she thought of Chae Yi and the way her skinny red nails had clamped into Lee Na-Sung's shoulders as if she owned him. Na-kyu would have liked to see Chae Yi dead; Chae Yi made her feel properly fictional, like the "other woman" she maybe was. It wasn't fair--

"That bitch had no right to come into my city," Na-kyu said, aloud again, though there was no one to hear her. She went into her closet and flicked dimly through her clothes; she let her night-slip fall on the floor and pulled on a pastel skirt and tight sweater. She put on lipstick and combed back her hair and clipped diamonds in her ears. Just in case. Just in case the smog thickened and he needed some reprieve from himself. Just in case he came hesitantly through the door, the pain thick and wet in his eyes. She imagined it, closing her eyes lightly against her skin: he would reach out to touch her collarbone with the slow wonder he always used, as if she were poetry and too much of her would drown him.