These Sainted Seouls | ongoing

section eleven: Hyun-ki & D4Y

Hyun-ki had a song inside his head. He could feel it bleeding through his fingers; he was going to loose it — he need paper, his recording studio, his piano. Already he had some lyrics scribbled down across his palm and his wrist. It was a compilation of his last nightmares and of the ringing image of Chae Yi sitting on her shit couch with the cats roving around her, like she was the queen of something. The queen of uselessness, maybe.

He revved his motorbike up the last few blocks, sliding into E&P's studio at a neat 45 mph. He circled once around the lot to slow down; he liked the hot spiking feeling of the engine bouncing up into his hands, the vibrations that shuddered into his leather gloves, with only his fingers bare to catch the actual heat of the metal. He turned from the bike to go inside, working out chord progressions and a chorus line behind his eyes. He was barely looking around, and so he heard them before he saw them.

"Yo, hyung!"

It was his three bandmates. They were sprawled around one of the stunted concrete walls that had been put up for obscene reasons but never taken down; the wind was in their hair and their lazy careless eyes. It was all an act: Hyun-ki saw this instantly. Why the hell were they laying around out here, when they should have been inside, working?

"Hey," he said, stretching out the word, so he wouldn't seem so instantly irritated. "What's going on?"

Jung-hwa stood up first. "You should know," he said bitterly. "It's your fault. I knew it would end like this."

"Is this about the album?" Hyun-ki said. "I thought we had it worked out by now. You agreed to use my concept album —to use my songs. Has that changed?"

"The concept album doesn't mean shit now," Jung-hwa said. "Nothing does."

The wind blew widely through the parking lot; they all looked absurdly fictional with their bright, fake hair and their too-big pastel jackets and printed skinny-jeans. It was a lot of vibrant paint splashed against cement, Hyun-ki thought; they looked like art, like a perfect still from a music viedo. But there was something unnatural in the air, something like the thickening of the second city around them and their thin, plastic lives. Or maybe it was just the feeling of his family and his horrible father, cracking into their lives like weeds through sidewalk. Hyun-ki had a desperate feeling that he knew already what was wrong. But no —that  couldn't be it. It couldn't. 

Hyun-ki walked over to them, so he could make proper eye-contact. Jung-hwa was tense and angry and ready for a fight, the blood-lust in his sharp face only just softened by his wavy carmarel hair. That was fake coloring, of course. The hair should have been black.

Park-yun had his guitar cradled on his lap and his fingers were distantly picking out something that sounded like 10cm. But he was looking away and into the sky; he would not meet Hyun-ki's eyes. Neither would Sung-jin. Their maknae was silent, his legs curled into his chest and his dark-red hair dripping down into his face. Fake color, again. Hyun-ki could not even picture him without his hair dyed in some wild color, without the paradigm of makeup slipped over his face. The worst part was the silence; Sung-jin was not made for silence. The quiet was like a scream, like Chae Yi ripping apart Second Seoul in his head with a sort of primitive wail.

"Hyungs?" Hyun-ki said, his voice cracking in the empty parking lot.

"So you don't know," Jung-hwa said. "Of course. Little chaebol's son in his golden kingdom —heaven forbid he knows what's happening down on earth."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Well, you know what they say about the one percent. Your head's in the clouds because you're standing on the shoulders of everyone else. But you should know about this, at least. Because it's your fault."