Dark Tide

Chapter 3

And if I have to
drown somewhere,
may I set myself
adrift
in your
fathomless eyes?

Headlights crawl along the eight-lane road at the edge of the Hangang and, further distant, over the bridges and into Seongsu-dong, the looming shadow of Achasan against the inky sky seems to intensify the glittering streets below.

"Why did you come here?" he asks, "I mean to start with. You didn't tell me."

She swallows, knowing that she is unable to lie to him. "Why do you think...?" she asks him, meeting his eyes. He holds her gaze, searching behind the green of her eyes for her meaning.

"Oh!" he says, and she wonders if he is even a little flustered by the realisation and her candid honesty. Then his mouth curls into a grin, his perfect teeth betraying his amusement, "Well, I hope we were worth it ..."

And all she can do is nod. It is impossible to tell him, without sounding clichéd, how that decision lit the touch-paper for a chain of events that brought her to where she is now. And it is too difficult to explain to him how she feels deeply at home in this nocturnal city, where she can be anonymously present.

They stand in silence, sipping coffee, a little way apart from each other, against the glass barrier. She senses him fidgeting beside her and hears him rhythmically tapping his fingers against the barrier. Then he sighs, breathing his thoughts out into the subtle chill, now lingering on the dark air. "I don't want to do it, you know..." His voice lilts up at the end of his sentence, like he wants her to ask him more.

"Which? The tour or the military?" and she knows she has read him clearly when he sighs again and agitatedly shuffles his hands along the glass barrier.

"Both," he shrugs. "Either. None of it." He fumbles in his pocket for his vape and then he outpours his tangled thoughts to her, punctuated by the click of the machine in his fingers and his intakes of breath. How everything now at the company hinges on him: his solo album release and his tour, which has been so hyped by the industry, that he worries it can only be an anticlimax. The way they kept him until the last, according to their neatly scheduled plan for continuity of success. The way that his impatient suggestions to enlist sooner and get it over and done with, and his contradicting idle wishes to leave it for another five years, were both met with stony selective hearing.

He tells her about the two big labels who approached him, offering him full autonomy over his career, his life, his future; and how close he has come to jumping from one bed of rules and schedules to another more financially lucrative one, more from boredom and bloody-mindedness than anything else.

"But I just don't get it," he breathes out with a cloud of sweet vapour, "how I'm supposed tour when I'm just me, alone. It makes no sense. Who wants to see that? They want..."

"I do," she interrupts his musings. "We all do."

"But I hate things like that alone. It feels... wrong... damaged..."

"You won't be alone," she tells him. "You'll have thousands of hearts beating with yours. Thousands of hands holding yours." and then she realises how terribly clichéd that sounds. "I'm sorry, I sound like one of those insufferable life coaches."

"I just think that all those months, I didn't know what to do with my free time, and I wished for something... anything... And now I don't want it. I'd rather do nothing again."

She sighs, shakes her head; afraid of spouting clichés at him again. Instead, she tells him about how she longed for her teaching post to end, but then couldn't cope with the void that she found herself in: how each day without a routine or a schedule just seemed to be full of overthinking and distorted time. Until that day I took a walk in the rain, she thinks, but she doesn't dare bring that up.