I only noticed yesterday morning... (I live in the US, so that would be around 8:00 on 9-26 for me) This has happened before and they've come back, idk maybe they're just working on something... but I don't know what's going on! If anyone knows anything more that would be helpful~
Arms reach over a rhythmically bobbing head, with a black earbud stuck in the left ear and another dangling from the right, to grab a small purple backpack, in which a purple notebook always rests, its pages wedged open by a purple pen, from the racks overhead. Hoya passes by the passengers, the decelerating scenery reflecting in many of their glazed eyes, while others sleep uncomfortably. The train smoothly slides to a halt, and when the door opens the heat sweeps in, enveloping the disembarking passengers.
Emerging from under the shade and off the cement floor of the station, Hoya’s feet hit familiar dirt roads, roads that beg to be danced on. He slides his feet in a quick experimental flourish, new yet strangely familiar, and the road joyfully gives up clay orange clouds in his wake. Hoya kicks up small clouds with his bouncing step as he walks through the streets, each site pregnant with intertwining memories of childhood and dance. Night spent learning how to break dance on the unforgiving concrete in the parking lot of the grocery store which sold soda for fifty cents to students within an hour after school was out; the rows of square wooden houses, painted alternating fading shades of yellow, pink, and blue, where they lived by day and imagined to be elaborate music video sets at night.
He looks down the streets for someone he might recognize, perhaps an old compatriot he used to dance with. The sky, though, is a dusty gray blue, still dotted with a couple quickly-fading stars. It’s too early for most to be up and about and too late for the young boys to be dancing in the streets. There are a couple early risers, watering their lawns or dutifully walking in quiet solitude, but other than that Yangsan looks empty.
There’s a familiar house down the road, a metal plate faintly gleaming on one of its wooden porch beams, white paint cracked but not yet peeling. The house slowly grows as he approaches until he can make out the numbers on the metal plate: 328. Inscribed underneath those numbers: Lee Family.
Hoya reaches the porch stairs and tugs his earbuds out of his ears, stuffing them into his jeans pocket with one hand as he jogs up the stairs. In front of the screen door, he hesitates. His right hand, previously occupied with the headphone cords, rubs its thumb idly on the corner of a photograph in his pocket: a family portrait with a declaration written across the back.
The plan had been to return in a blaze of victory which would be strong enough to reduce the nauseating disappointment of this place to ash. It hadn’t worked out that way, of course.
It’s been eight months since Dongwoo passed away. Even though they knew it was coming, it rammed through Infinite like a wrecking ball, shattering them. There was a brief hiatus for grieving and the funeral, but too soon they were pushed, staggering, back to work. No one in the dorm wanted to bring it up, but it was everywhere. Myungsoo, Dongwoo’s roommate, usually so carefully organized, threw his stuff into the living room and began sleeping there.
Slowly, really because they had no choice—time, after all, stops for no one—the members began to put themselves back together, piece by piece. They remembered what it meant to be Infinite again, remembered the immersion and life of a performance, life which slowly bled back into them. They slowly began to remember the things that had made up their lives before. Still, there was something that hung over them, some restrictive film stretched over everything that left something perpetually caught in their throats, and that’s when Hoya took it upon himself to clean out Dongwoo’s dorm room.
The room had been untouched since Dongwoo’s passing. About a week afterwards, a manager had tried to go in to begin cleaning out, but there had been a silent but definite visceral antagonism from the members, so strong that two words from Sunggyu—“not now”—were enough to stop him. Now, the members grudgingly let Hoya enter that sacred place, seemingly untouched by time.
The room was in its usual state of disarray. The only notable change was the skeletal coat hangers on Myungsoo’s side of the closet. It almost looked like Myungsoo had been the one to pass away, and Dongwoo still lived there. The feeling was so strong that Hoya had to stand in the doorway for a few minutes before he could even hope to touch anything.
He started with the basics, sorting Dongwoo’s belongings into trash and boxes to give back to the family. Everything in that room still seemed to carry Dongwoo’s feeling, everything Hoya held was a physical reminder of loss, and even worse was putting that item down into a box to be sent away. Eventually, though, he began to find things so characteristic of Dongwoo that he could not help but to smile: the foam football buried in the bedsheets, which he had probably absentmindedly kneaded between his fingers as he fell asleep at night, the clumsy pile of pants in the corner of the room and the rings carefully arranged in a box beside them.
The process was slow, halting for busy weekday schedules, and then resuming during the weekends. Sungjong was the first to join Hoya in the room. He had silently opened and closed the door behind him, and then began sorting things into their appropriate boxes alongside Hoya. Sunggyu had been the last. All together, they began pointing out the quirks of the room to each other, finally allowing themselves to remember, allowing themselves to laugh and cry. It was like Dongwoo was in that room with them, no longer a dull depressing vagueness but something that encouraged them to let themselves live with the past. It was the first moment that felt like they had finally ruptured that inescapable film, and they felt alive and unburdened.
The next morning, the film was back, but it began to become frayed, showing holes and breaks with more and more frequency. As that pressure slowly released, though, Hoya gradually became aware of something else tugging at him, something else unspoken and unfaceable. He had tried to ignore it for months but, finding that he couldn’t… well, that’s what brought him here. No blaze of glory, no burning sun, just a dusty morning after a long night.
Hoya breathes deeply through his nose, then presses the small white doorbell.
The house is silent. Hoya wonders if he should press the doorbell again, or perhaps just leave, when he hears the soft padding of slippered feet coming down the front hallway. The rusted brass handle of the faded white door turns and Hoya feels himself tensing, awaiting the tall dark monolith dominating the doorway.
The door opens and there’s a man dressed in loose-fitting gray pajamas, well built but with his back bent a little from tiredness and his head showing the first signs of thinning gray hair. Under furrowed thick eyebrows and behind thin metal spectacles his bleary eyes squint at Hoya in the dim flat light. Looking at his tired eyes, Hoya is suddenly reminded of Mr. Jang. Both men who, in some way or other, have lost a son.
“Hi,” Hoya says. Hearing his own voice, his fear is replaced by nervous awkwardness. He clears his throat.
“Howon?” His voice is a dry whisper.
“Yeah, Dad. It’s me.”
“Oh my god.” Hoya’s dad suddenly straightens and envelopes his son in a hug. Hoya, surprised, stands still for a second before carefully wrapping his arms around his father. The father pulls away, smiling softly with closed lips.
“Come in! I have to wake up your mother first but come in!” Mr. Lee disappears down the hallway. Hoya whisper calls for him not to wake her up, but Mr. Lee just waves his hand above his receding back.
The shock slides off and Hoya suddenly feels relieved of a weight, a weight that’s been sitting on his chest for so long that he had forgotten about it many years ago. But Dongwoo had made him remember.
Dongwoo.
Hoya jerks his head back as the sudden relief and memory make his eyes sting and his vision is blur. Slowly, though, the tears recede, and the gray sky fills his cleared eyes. A vague pink has already begun to spill across it. The sky is so vast and beautiful that, for a moment, Hoya feels that he could fall into it.
A breeze, momentary respite from the sweating heat, sweeps through the street and curls around his ears. In it Hoya hears the echoes of a clear laugh, immediately recognizable; a laugh fearlessly honest and open to all the pain and joy of the world.
[[*Heaves a long sigh* Well, we've finally come to the end, haven't we? Honestly, it snuck up on me and surprised me too.
Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to read, comment, and subscribe to this story and have shared it with me. Your comments have been so kind, and I can only hope that you've enjoyed the ride. My heart goes out to those of you who made "Dongwoo fighting!" comments... I'm sorry guys D:
Of course, I'm still open to hearing all thoughts and comments. It has been amazing to see this story reach others when originally I only intended to show it to three other people. Thank you again for reading, you've made this story more than I thought it could be.
Hoya waits a couple seconds after his knock before he opens the door this time. When he enters, Dongwoo is still sleeping, but Mr. Jang is sitting upright and awake on the couch.
“Good morning, Howon,” he says.
“Good morning, Mr. Jang,” Hoya says, bowing at the waist.
“Hey, Hoya,” he croaks.
“Hey, Dongwoo.”
A couple more minutes pass as Dongwoo wakes himself up, his eyes slowly blinking wider. When he yawns, his mouth seems to take up his whole face, teeth and gums all exposed, before quickly shrinking back to its usual size. Dongwoo turns his head towards the window and sees that it’s a soft pink, tinted by the rising sun.
He tries to sit up and Hoya quickly helps him, easing his back. Dongwoo stares out into the sky, his eyes reflecting the cloudless pink expanse. He stares at it for a long time, barely noticing when his father soundlessly exits the bathroom and sits in his usual armchair. The sky slowly brightens to a brighter peach as the sunlight begins to filter through the window, softly illuminating Dongwoo’s face and warming his pale cheeks. Dongwoo pulls his hands out from under the covers, laying them on his lap. He then sits perfectly still, simply absorbing the sunrise until, 10 minutes later, the sun sits fully atop the horizon.
Hoya touches Dongwoo’s arm, warm from the sunlight.
“You ready to walk?” he asks.
Dongwoo drags his eyes away from the sunrise and looks down at his legs hidden under layers of covers. He slowly begins to ease them towards the side of the bed with his hands, but he takes a sharp inhale of breath and pauses. He slowly lets go of his legs and lays himself back down into the bed.
“I’m sorry. Not today.”
Hoya feels the quick swell of panic that rises in his throat and hears the rush of water in his ears. He pushes it away.
“That’s fine,” he says, patting Dongwoo’s shoulder, hating the phrase’s lameness.
It’s about 4 o’clock. Infinite’s in the van, coming back from a fansigning when the manager gets a call from Dongwoo’s mom. Their trajectory is immediately shifted.
None of the members say anything. Mrs. Jang’s voice on the phone had been low and carefully measured, the occasional exhausted sigh drawing itself out from the earpiece. Although her words had been muffled against the manager’s ears, they had heard enough.
“Too soon,” Hoya thinks.
Dongwoo was supposed to have at least a week left. That’s what Dongwoo had said, that’s what the doctor had said, that was the agreement. Seven days had been hard enough to swallow, but that’s all that Hoya had asked for, had expected.
Time, though, waits for no one.
So Hoya sits quietly in the back of the van, his eyes closed, letting the icy rush of fear flow in around him, and focusing on keeping at least his head above the water.
When they arrive at the hospital, they file in with their faces carefully composed. They can’t help, though, that their steps accelerate as they approach the elevator. They watch the numbers above the elevator door slowly slide downward. 9…8…7… Sungyeol is the first to make a break for the stairs, and he’s immediately followed by the other members, their careful line breaking into a pack as they take the stairs 2 and 3 at a time. The blood pumping in their ears overpowers the noise of their soles slapping on the ground.
Hoya is the first to reach the fifth floor, and he throws open the stairwell door. The other members stream through it before it closes, and they sprint down the hallway. Hoya grabs the door handle to Dongwoo’s room, but right before he turns it, he stops. He closes his eyes, taking a couple deep breaths. He hears the footsteps of the other members clatter to a halt behind him, and he hears the shaky quieting of breath, the calming of a beast which had momentarily taken over.
Hoya opens the door and walks in, followed by the rest of Infinite.
Dongwoo’s family is packed tightly around his bed. His mother and father stand next to his head on either side of him, his mother holding one of his hands. His sisters stand by the sides of his bed, and one of their backs shudder as she brings her hand to her mouth. The other sister puts her hand on her sister’s hip, slowly guiding her to the side, making enough space for one other person.
Sungjong goes first, and the members of the Jang family reform around him like a protective cocoon as he talks to Dongwoo quietly. The members hear a sudden hiccupping sob as Sungjong leans down to hug Dongwoo, but it’s quickly muffled in Dongwoo’s shoulder. Sungjong finally lets go and steps away, staring fixedly at the ground.
Myungsoo bites his lip as he takes Sungjong’s place. The other members see his hard swallows in profile, but he keeps his composure and, after hugging Dongwoo, leaves him with a soft smile
Sungyeol hangs in the back of the group, so Woohyun walks forward next. The tears are already streaming down his cheeks, and Dongwoo chuckles drily at him as he rubs his arm, and the other members hear him say, “Ah, what is this? Are you trying to make me cry too?” Woohyun laughs sadly and talks to Dongwoo earnestly, as if his words are able to mask his tears.
Sunggyu nudges Sungyeol forward and he trippingly approaches Dongwoo’s bed. He stands by Dongwoo, struggling to maintain his composure, his eyes so narrowed in concentration that he accidentally squeezes out his own tears. Dongwoo laughs softly at him too, smacking his arm lightly with his palm. Sungyeol wipes his tear away, laughing at himself too and kneels by Dongwoo’s bed, talking to him softly before brushing Dongwoo’s hair with his palm and walking away, hiding his lowered face beneath a hand cupped over his brow.
Sunggyu glances at Hoya, who still waits, and finally takes his place at Dongwoo’s side. He takes Dongwoo’s hand and holds it for a while, speaking formally as if he’s giving a speech (a eulogy?), staring intently at Dongwoo’s hands, rearranging the fingers around his own. When he’s finished, he looks at Dongwoo’s face, and smiles a little as he suddenly grips his hands in a tight shake. Hoya manages to make out his lips forming the words, “How am I going to take care of these kids without you?” Dongwoo laughs and pulls him into a hug. Hoya sees Sunggyu’s back rise and fall in one long breath, but when he walks away from Dongwoo’s bed he’s poised, head level and eyes dry. His gaze seems to be somewhere else, far away from this hospital room.
Hoya enters the fold of the Jang family and sees that they are all wrapped up in their own worlds, each looking at Dongwoo’s face as if they are trying to imprint it in their minds. Within that human wall, Hoya almost feels that he’s alone with Dongwoo.
He touches Dongwoo’s hand, and the white fluorescent lights around him dim to a dull gray. His surroundings fade, and he feels the familiar tug of cold water around his knees.
He strides forward, intuitively sensing the right direction. Gradually, a subtle change in the sound of the water registers and a large circular edge enters his view, barely perceptible against the flat glassy surface of the stream. The water silently glides over its rim into some depth deep below. Moving towards it, Hoya spots a small pale figure sitting at its edge.
Dongwoo is submerged up to his chest in the stream, his white hospital gown floating around his body. His hair is a couple wisps, bleached and grayed, and his eyebrows have faded into light pencil-thin lines. His thin legs dangle over the edge of the hole. The flat light smooths the angles of his face and softens the hollows, and in a body which has lost the masculine swells of musculature he looks like a child.
He looks up and smiles. It’s a subdued smile, where his gums don’t show and his eyes stay open, but still warm as ever.
“You came! I’ve been waiting,” he says. He glances at the spot next to him. “Here, sit down.”
Hoya slowly submerges himself, first sitting on his knees. A shock runs through his body as the cold water hits his stomach and quickly chills the rest of his body. He pauses, and then slowly unfolds his legs out from under him, and dangling them over the edge, beside Dongwoo’s. The curvature of his calves contrast against Dongwoo’s painfully straight ones, but the water has made both of their legs pale.
Although Hoya’s weight solidly roots him on the edge, his hands skitter across the silty riverbed, searching for some kind of handhold. There is none. He looks behind him, fearful of a sudden swell in the river that will send him hurtling downward, but the water is flat as far as the eye can see. It occurs to Hoya that this must be what it feels like to sit on the edge of Death.
They sit in silence. Dongwoo does not seem worried about their precarious perch, but Hoya struggles to keep his nervous heart in check, steadying its rapid beats and trying not to think about the hole in front of him
“How can you stand it?” he asks.
The water around them shifts a little, creeping up Hoya’s chest for a second before, with a firm look, Dongwoo calms it.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I didn’t think I could and now I don’t really have a choice, do I? I’m here now, and it’s almost become as matter of fact as living.”
Hoya nods and they sit together, looking at the gray sky all around them. The sky, though, slowly begins to change in color, and Hoya realizes that there’s a dim orb of light above them, more like a moon than a sun, which has begun to set. It projects dark reds and purples against the gray, subtly coloring the dark sky. The moon’s rim touches the watery horizon, sending reflections of its light wavering through its surface.
“Do you know what I was thinking of this morning?” Dongwoo asks.
Hoya thinks of Dongwoo looking out the window. “That you wanted to be the sun, burning the sky with your brilliance every time you rose.”
Dongwoo chuckles, the sound more breath than voice.
“I guess that’s one way of thinking about it.” He watches the moon-sun thoughtfully. “I wasn’t really looking at the sun, actually. Bad for the eyes and all. I think we always thought that, in order to be Infinite, we had to be like the sun, all burning brilliance, dominating the sky, but this time I was looking at the sky. I was thinking… if there really is anything Infinite, that’s it. The sun will burn out, but the sky is everything, a window to the universe that is forever. This morning, when I looked at it… I felt like I was being drawn into it, and I wanted to be; I didn’t want to stand over it, I wished that I could be part of that Infinite.”
The sun-moon is half below the horizon.
“We have to look at what part we do have and accept it in all its limitations and possibility. We have to be able to move forward.”
Dongwoo looks over at Hoya
“We’ve had five years together. It’s not much, literally zero if you take it over infinity. It’s not zero, though. It’s five years, it has a quantity, it exists.”
The sun-moon is now only a sliver above the water, and the purple and red dyed ray is fading to black.
“Let’s go,” Dongwoo says.
Hoya stands up slowly, trying to disturb the water as little as possible. The stream slips from his body, leaving it perfectly dry as he exits the water. Dongwoo sits sill in the water and Hoya quickly bends over and pulls him up.
They stand on the edge of death, holding each other’s forearms tightly as the water swirls around their knees, becoming more urgent, pushing them towards that hole. Dongwoo smiles at Hoya, tilting his head.
“You’ve always pulled me up, Hoya. Thank you.”
Hoya just stares at Dongwoo, not knowing how to respond, bewildered as to why he was being thanked and taking in Dongwoo’s face, wiling himself to remember it, because he’ll be gone too soon. When he thinks that, there’s not the usual terror, but a deep feeling of sadness. He feels like crying, but he keeps his face composed, for Dongwoo’s sake.
Of course, Dongwoo can read Hoya like an open book.
“It’s okay,” Dongwoo says. He pulls Hoya into a hug, surprisingly strong for someone so frail. “It’s okay.”
Hoya holds onto Dongwoo and cries quietly. Dongwoo cries quietly too, squeezing his tears into Hoya’s shoulder.
They slowly come apart, their hands moving back to each other’s forearms, their faces red and burning against the damp air, a last blaze in the cold.
“Dongwoo…” Hoya’s hates the weakness in his voice, the way it wobbles unsteadily, and he takes a couple more gulps of air. His mind races and stumbles as it tries to piece together the perfect expression of what he feels. “I’m supposed to be the one comforting you, but you’re the one… I’m a real ass. I have no idea why you didn’t give up on me-”
Dongwoo can’t help but to laugh through the messy streaks of tears on his face.
“Hoya, how could I give up when I love you?”
And, so easily, so honestly, Dongwoo just says it. And Hoya understands.
They walk forward, letting the water push them along to the edge, until they can see their own reflections in the smooth water lying at the bottom of the abyss. The water is perfectly clear, but it seems to stretch down forever, no bottom in sight.
“What do you think is down there?” Hoya asks.
“I have no idea,” Dongwoo says.
Hoya crouches down to one knee, and Dongwoo clambers over the side, until he is suspended over the deep by Hoya’s arms.
“You’ll be okay, right?” Dongwoo asks.
“I think so,” Hoya answers.
“You ready?” Dongwoo smiles wryly up at him, and Hoya’s breath hitches in his throat because he knows what he should say, but he can’t he can’t he can’t. The breath comes through though and Hoya smiles softly sadly at Dongwoo.
“Always.”
Dongwoo lets go of Hoya’s arms.
His thin arms slip through Hoya’s grasp and for a moment, his wrists catch on Hoya’s fingers and suddenly a million thoughts burst in Hoya’s head.
Dongwoo. The one person Hoya could count on, the one friendship he knew he couldn’t fuck up. Even if Infinite had failed, Hoya had always believed that he and Dongwoo would make it together. The one person who had loved him and he had finally let himself love, only in time to lose him.
He is Dongwoo’s last link to life, and in a split second he entertains fantasies of both hauling Dongwoo up and carrying him back to life, and of sliding forward into the depths with Dongwoo.
He knows, though, that he can’t do either of those things.
“We have to look at what part we do have and accept it in all its limitations and possibility. We have to be able to move forward.”
Hoya is not Dongwoo’s last link to life, he is a ball and chain. Interwoven in that concept of the Infinite is that of Love. Dongwoo is ready to die, he has to die, but the question is: Is Hoya ready for Dongwoo to die? There’s so much left undone, so much he hasn’t said.
I don’t really have a choice, do I?
This is all that I can say.
“I love you, Dongwoo.” Hoya says, and lets go.
Dongwoo enters the glassy surface without a sound. There’s a final flicker of light as the sun-moon fully sets, and in that flicker Hoya sees Dongwoo’s form disappear beneath the surface of the pool, the hospital gown blooming around him like a water lily, right before the world goes black.
Hoya starts when he hears a low grunt come from the other side of the room. He sees a dark form rising from the couch, the silhouette of a man (standing behind a screen door or..?), which resolves itself into Dongwoo’s father sitting bent over on the couch, rubbing his face from the forehead down and squinting at the sudden light.
“Oh, sorry Mr. Jang, I didn’t-”
Mr. Jang halts the apology with a shake of his head and wave of his hand. He slowly sits up and returns to his usual position: legs set shoulder-width apart, back straight, hands resting comfortably on his thighs. He looks at Hoya with a straight unwavering gaze. Hoya can’t help but to stand up straighter.
“You’re here early, Lee Howon.”
“Yes, sir. Early riser.”
Mr. Jang looks at his sleeping son.
“I’ve heard that from Dongwoo,” he says. “You two are opposites, nothing can wake Dongwoo before he is ready.”
“He always got up early to practice,” Hoya says.
“Really?” Dongwoo’s father thinks about that for a while. He stands up and walks over to Dongwoo’s bed, placing his head on the top of his son’s head.
“He wakes up later and later every day now.”
A couple seconds of silence pass, but then Dongwoo begins to stir. He opens his eyes and sees his father.
“Good morning, Dad,” he says, the remnants of sleep slightly slurring his words.
“Good morning, Dongwoo,” he returns, cracking a smile that makes his eyes wrinkle, like Dongwoo’s do. “Who would have guessed that you would start balding before me?”
Dongwoo laughs and his father’s smile softens, somewhere around the edges of the eyes, and Mr. Jang suddenly no longer looks like the formidable fortress of a man that Hoya has always seen, but a father who is scared to lose his son.
Mr. Jang moves his hand from Dongwoo’s head to his lower back. He helps his son to sit up, and Dongwoo slowly moves his legs, dangling them over the side of the bed. Hoya catches a glimpse of Dongwoo’s legs, slim and messily bruised with purple and blotched with yellow, before his toes touch the floor and the hospital gown settles around his ankles. Dongwoo looks up and sees Hoya standing in the doorway.
“Hoya!” he exclaims. “You know, I thought I heard you.,.” He gingerly stands, testing his weight on his feet. “Wanna go for a walk?” he asks, his smile slightly crooked.
Hoya glances at Dongwoo’s father, who has silently moved back to his usual stance in the arm chair, before nodding. He lays his hands lightly on Dongwooo’s arm, and when Dongwoo doesn’t pull away he holds it more firmly, but is still not sure how firm to be, and they slowly leave the room, Dongwoo shuffling beside Hoya’s slow motion stride.
They hallways are dimly lit, only every other light illuminated. The faint morning light comes in from the few windows, casting squares of bluish tint on the white walls. It’s quiet except for the faint murmuring of the nurses who talk over coffee in the break room. Dongwoo lays his hand on a metal rail that runs along the right wall of the hallway and straightens as he places one foot in front of the other.
“I’ve been walking like this with my father everyday,” he explains.
Hoya nods, still holding onto Dongwoo’s arm with that hovering firmness.
“How’s everyone at the dorm doing?”
Hoya shrugs. “They’re managing, some better than others.”
Dongwoo nods, and they continue to inch down the hallway, Dongwoo pulling himself forward with the railing for every step.
“How about you?” he asks.
Hoya thinks, their familiar silence setting in. He thinks for a long time but whatever he’s feeling, he can’t express.
“I’ve… I’ve been trying to write what’s happened over the last couple days,” He says. “It’s all crap, but… it’s all that I can say.” He quickly turns to Dongwoo. “How are you feeling?”
They turn a corner and Dongwoo’s effort shows in the beads of sweat on his forehead.
“The chemo’s difficult. The liver damage is a big problem.” He sighs. “Everyday I get more tired and the pain gets worse.” He stops walking and leans against the wall, breathing heavily.
“My family, too. Mom… she tries really hard to hide it, but when I told her I couldn’t eat her… and Dad, even he has his limits. My sisters...” He sighs and straightens, putting his hand back on the railing and beginning to walk down the hallway, back to his room.
“You know, I know you’re busy, and you don’t need to come every day,” Dongwoo says, glancing at Hoya.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Hoya says.
Dongwoo laughs, lowering his face. “You’re right, you’re right, sorry. I shouldn’t be saying stuff like that.” He grab’s Hoya’s hand and smiles, looking up into his face.
“You know that I’m grateful for all the times you’ve come, right? Thank you, thank you.”
Hoya glances to the side, smiling awkwardly. He feels something he should say in response caught in his throat, but he can’t coax it out.
Dongwoo releases his hand and smiles as he continues shuffling down the hallway. When they reach his room, Dongwoo checks his watch.
“You’ve got practice to go to, right?” he asks.
Hoya shrugs. “Not really, I can stay.”
Dongwoo shakes his head. “No, my mom and sisters will be here soon, and I have to talk to my Dad about a couple of things anyway. I’ll see you later, okay?”
Hoya hesitates. He glances into the hospital room and sees Dongwo’s father waiting patiently in his arm chair. He lets his hand drop from Dongwoo’s arm, nodding slowly.
“I’m not supposed to eat anything spicy while I’m on radiation,” he continues, squeezing her arm. “Sorry.”
“This hospital,” she mutters, slowly putting the Styrofoam back in its plastic bag. She sits next to Dongwoo’s head, softly stroking his face as he tells her his memories of the restaurant: the constant smell of delicious food you could almost taste, the chaotic noise in the kitchen covered by the conversations of the customers in the front, the small pieces of octopus she would sneak him once in a blue moon. She nods along absently as she runs her thumb along Dongwoo’s already-thinning eyebrows.
About a half hour later, there’s a knock on the door.
“Come in,” Dongwoo’s mom calls.
Woohyun rushes to the bed, comfortably inserting himself in the space left open by Dongwoo’s family and bowing to everyone as he rubs Dongwoo’s arm. Myungsoo stands slightly behind Woohyun, smiling quietly at Woohyun’s generic but unashamed jokes which immediately fill Sunggyu’s awkward silences. Sungjong talks to Dongwoo’s mother, nodding his head in understanding and delicately covering his mouth with the back of his left hand when he laughs at her stories of young Dongwoo. She too laughs at his stories of the older Dongwoo, occasionally narrowing her eyes in mock disapproval and saying, “I didn’t hear anything about that.”
The hospital room becomes almost festive, perhaps partly because of the entranceof the members. The one who really sells the change is Dongwoo’s mother, who stood up as they walked in and, although she is much shorter than Sungjong now, and definitely shorter than the Sungyeol which stands by him and adds his laughter, she stands up straight so that she seems to be as tall. She’s a good sport, who masterfully guides the conversation away from future grief and instead to past happiness.
Washing his face doesn’t give Hoya any new ideas, so he grabs his jacket and sets off into the clear gray morning towards the dance studio. When he gets there, he wipes his shoes on the doormat, shrugs off his jacket, and puts in his earbuds, turning up the volume of his iPod to drown out his own scrabbling thoughts.
He practices for a bit, carefully observing his reflection as he feels his body begin to warm up, radiating heat into the surrounding still cold air. After about thirty minutes, he pulls out his earbuds and walks to the back corner of the room. He turns on the fan there, and then squats down by the water cooler, sipping from a paper cone of water. A couple papers skitter by him, pushed by the fan’s draft, and he quickly steps on them before crouching down to pick them up.
He immediately recognizes Dongwoo’s nearly unreadable scrawl filling the pages. The letters suddenly become larger, and then gradually shrink again, correlating to his level of excitement.
Hoya reaches up and turns off the fan, then lays the sheets in front of him. Dongwoo has annotated the pages in a green pen, presumably during his re-reading. There’s one word densely circled by the green pen, and Hoya lifts that green marked page from the floor, peering at it and finally making out the word.
“Remember.”
Hoya snorts. Well, that’s what he’s trying to do, but it’s somewhat easier said than done.
He sets down the page and, glancing at the others he notices the date written at the top of one. September 1st, 2011. The day of their first #1 win.
Hoya immediately brings the page up to his noise, squints at it and begins to slowly translate Dongwoo’s scribbles. Hoya can barely remember what it felt like to win that time. He has some faint impressions of lights and hugs, but nothing more than that. Here, though, was something concrete, something that could spark his memory.
It turns out that Dongwoo’s writing is not only illegible, but nearly incomprehensible. It’s full of metaphors that start, and then trail off to nothing, or bullet pointed descriptions of miniscule details. Suddenly, though, these wispy trails of thought solidify into a dialogue, each line alternately labeled “Hoya” and “Me”
Hoya: What are you doing?
Me: Writin.
Hoya: Well, yeah…
Me: Making sure I remember (that word circled and circled and circled), you know?
Hoya: You think you could really forget?
Me: It’s amazing what we can forget in a couple years.
Hoya: In a couple years there will be other wins to remember, though
Hoya picks up the papers and slips them into his bag. He turns off the lights in the room, and, putting his coat back on, heads to the hospital.
Dongwoo is eating rice porridge when Hoya knocks on the door and comes in. He drags up his stool, as usual, and after fishing in his bag, brings out a thin stack of papers and lays them on the breakfast table, smirking slightly.
“These look familiar?” he asks.
Dongwoo almost chokes on his breakfast, and then blushes brilliantly.
“Where did you get these?”
“You left them in the dance practice room.”
“What?” Dongwoo thinks for a moment, staring at the pages. He then nods slowly and picks up the papers, examining them.
“Ah, our first #1 win,” he muses.
“Yeah, and you wrote more about a conversation we had afterwards than about the actual thing.”
Dongwoo chuckles as his eyes scan the entry.
“I don’t know, so much happened that night that it felt like a dream…” he looks at his attempts at description, shaking his head. “The thing that felt the most real that night was our conversation, so that’s what I could say.”
Dongwoo takes his own notebook from his bedside table and carefully presses the pages Hoya brought back into their torn binding. Hoya turns Dongwoo’s words over in his mind. In the past, those sort of thoughts would’ve seemed so nonsensical to him that he would’ve dismissed them, but now he mulls over them.
Hoya turns as he hears the door open behind him. An older women, and two girls around his own age sweep in. The older woman brushes past Hoya, proceeding to fuss over Dongwoo. She brushes his hair away from his forehead and rubs his shoulder as she chatters.
“Hi, Mom, hey Kkotip , hey-“
“How are you feeling?” his mom asks.
“I’m doing oka-“
“What have you been up to? Does the hospital have any activities?”
“Um…”
Dongwoo laughs, knowing the futility of trying to answer all his mother’s questions. The sisters stand by Dongwoo’s bed and Dongwoo’s dad takes the arm chair. Hoya hadn’t even noticed him coming in, he must have followed the initial rush.
Having rearranged Dongwoo’s hair into some acceptable order of disarray, Dongwoo’s mom reaches down into a plastic bag at her feet. She takes out a plate and a wide Styrofoam cup. She pulls the plastic lid off of the cup and pours its contents (naji bokum) onto the plate. She’s bringing it to the microwave, still asking Dongwoo questions about his health, when she notices Hoya there.
“Hoya!” She says, quickly putting down the plate on the table and embracing him.
Hoya hugs her back, a little stiffly, but she doesn’t seem to notice it, her hug as warm as Dongwoo’s laugh. With his arms wrapped around her well-pressed blouse, he feels her breath and notices the slight hesitation before each exhale, and the slight catch before each exhale. She puts her head on his shoulder and Hoya understands.
She gives his arms a quick squeeze and then pulls away. Hoya stays slightly bent, trying awkwardly to offer a sympathetic smile, and she nods slightly in thanks. She picks up the plate again and the quiet moment is gone as she brings it to the microwave, telling Dongwoo how important it is to eat well and how everyone at home thinks so also.
She takes a deep breath as the microwave begins to warm up (something has to fuel all that chattering, after all) and the sisters take the opportunity to exchange a few quiet words with Dongwoo. Hoya can’t hear what they’re saying, all he sees are their sad smiles and their hands softly patting Dongwoo’s legs through the sheets as Dongwoo talks, nodding his head with the cadence of each deliberate statement.
Dongwoo’s mom soon returns with a hot plate of food. Taking a seat by Dongwoo pillow, she balances the plate on her knees as she expertly cracks a pair of chopsticks, also taken from the bag. She begins to feed Dongwoo, insisting that the hospital food is insufficient. Dongwoo laughs again, trying to explain around a mouthful of octopus that the food is perfectly fine. Dongwoo’s mom sets down her chopsticks with a huff.
“So I guess it’s better than your mother’s naji bokum then,” she snips.
“No no, that’s not what I-,” Dongwoo begins, but she quickly stuffs another chopstick-load of octopus into his mouth, laughing with him.
Hoya checks his watch. It’s 9:30; he should be getting back to the dorm. He leans over, catching Dongwoo’s eye around the body of his mother, and waves, mouthing “I’ll see you later.” Dongwoo waves back, calling “goodbye” around a mouthful of octopus. His mother turns around and bows slightly, her conversation with Dongwoo instantly becoming a stream of thanks to Hoya for staying with her son, as Hoya smiles and waves it off, telling her that it’s really not a big deal. Dongwoo’s father, sitting with his elbows on the armrest of his chair and hands folded in front of him, offers Hoya a small nod and Hoya bows back before heading out.
When Hoya walks in, the other members and the managers are sitting around the kitchen table, eating breakfast. Hoya bows deeply and apologizes to the managers, telling them he will stay with Infinite. They nod silently, pretending that they’re doing him a favor in accepting his apology, but Hoya can tell that they’re secretly relieved from the quiet relaxing of their features.
“How’s he doing?” Sunggyu asks as Hoya sits down at the table.
“He was in pretty good spirits this morning, his family’s with him.” Hoya folds his hands in front of him on the table. “The cancer’s metastasized. He starts radiation therapy today, but his chances of recovery are very slim.”
“Is he going to come back to the dorm?” Woohyun asks.
Hoya swallows, forcing himself to look at Woohyun. “Probably not.”
The table is silent. Woohyun brings his bowl, still full of cereal to the sink. When he gets there, though, he just stands there, staring at the wall, bowl in hand. Sunggyu finally stands up, and his action ripples through the table as life clicks back into motion.
That night, after hours of forced smiles, Hoya sits down at Dongwoo’s desk. His mind whirs with the thoughts and frustrations of last night. So much in his head, but nothing which comes easily. Hoya watches the digital clock blink on and on.
His arm hangs heavily at his side, as if it’s some nonliving extension to his body, but Hoya slowly lifts it and places his pen on the paper. He forces his pen to move across it, painfully beginning to write:
Nothing I write now can fully explain or satisfy me. I write only to remember. Hopefully, sometime in the future, these notes that will help me to finally put it all together...
Hoya pulls his phone out of his pocket and glances at it.
“Dongwoo.”
“What does it say.” A little agitation creeps into Sunggyu’s voice.
Hoya’s thumb taps the phone screen.
“He wants me to visit him today.”
Sunggyu brings his bowl to the sink.
“Go.” He comes over and takes the empty bowl in front of Hoya. “Now.”
As he turns the street corner, Hoya considers finding somewhere to stand for a couple hours, and then coming back and telling Sunggyu that he went.
He shakes his head. That obviously wouldn’t work. What would Sunggyu do if he found out, though? What, get angry?
Earlier that morning, the managers had approached Hoya, asking him if he needed some time away from Infinite. They had already looked defeated even before they asked, thinking that there was no way in hell Hoya would agree to a break, they had looked ready to plead, but Hoya had quickly answered that he would consider it. Infinite was like a rickety building at this point, ready to collapse at any moment, and he was somewhat anxious to get out before it did.
Without Infinite, very little could be held over Hoya’s head. He really wasn’t obligated to do much of anything.
He kicks a pebble off the side walk and digs his hands into his pockets, sniffing loudly. It’s surprisingly cold outside. It really shouldn’t be, considering that it’s the middle of the winter, but he just never noticed it before.
Hoya then notices that his feet have already begun to trace the route to the hospital and he shrugs. Well, he might as well go, he doesn’t know why he wouldn’t. If he owes anything to anyone, he guesses that it’s Dongwoo, he just doesn’t know why he has to make this whole thing so messy.
When Hoya walks in, Dongwoo is lying in bed, eyes closed and hands folded over his stomach. There’s a shadow of a smile that dances on his lips, and Hoya thinks that he must be asleep, dreaming of somewhere happier than here. Dongwoo, though, is only resting, and he opens his eyes and turns when Hoya sits down on his stool.
“Hello,” he says, breaking out in a smile.
Hoya looks down at his hands resting on the stool between his legs. “Yeah, hi.”
They sit in silence, familiar and comfortable.
“What happened yesterday?” Dongwoo asks, almost casually.
Hoya shrugs. “Messed up, I guess.”
Dongwoo chuckles. “You don’t mess up.”
Another silence.
“Are you,” he forces himself to say the word, “dying?”
“It’s… very likely,” Dongwoo replies.
“How long do you have left?”
“The cancer’s metastasized. The doctors say a week, maybe a month or more if the chemo goes well.”
A week. 7 days. The idea makes Hoya feel sick and he stares at his hands, trying to ignore the churning in his stomach.
“How can you stand it?” he whispers.
Dongwoo turns his head and looks out the window on the other side of the room.
“I think, I guess I just keep thinking that I’ll get better.”
“But—you’re not.”
“I know—I know.” Dongwoo look at his hands on his stomach, now bony instead of slender. “I know that I’m dying but… I just can’t even imagine it. I can’t see myself as dead.”
Hoya thinks, ‘You can’t see it, but I can.’
“You’re going to spend your last seven days hoping to get better, so what happens on the seventh day, when you don’t?”
Dongwoo shrugs, his eyes fixed on his tense hands. “I don’t know.”
Hoya shakes his head. He gets up and starts to pace agitatedly from one end of the small room to the other.
“I don’t see the point of all this hoping and fighting when it doesn’t seem to matter at all anyway,” he says. Words, never before his choice medium of expression, sputter from his mouth. “You’ll be gone, then Infinite will fall apart, and the last eight years won’t have mattered. It’ll be like they never happened.” Hoya closes his eyes and digs his fingertips into his forehead, pausing his pacing for a moment. “It would be easier if everything was already gone with a clean cut. Then I could forget. But instead I get to watch both you and Infinite die, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m reminded every day of what I’m about to lose.”
“Why did you care at all in the first place?” Dongwoo asks.
“I guess I was just an idiot who didn’t know any better.”
“So the fire that drove you here was only stupidity?”
Hoya remembers hot nights in Yangsan, spent laughing and sweating and dancing on the street with his friends. He remembers wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, even though it would be just as drenched within seconds. That unbearable heat, though, was intrinsically tied to his pleasure, and after wandering the dark streets for many nights, he took the heat as a sort of rival. He would watch the other guys sitting on the curb, pouring water bottles over their heads and fanning themselves with flyers they ripped from lamp posts. Hoya, though, would be the last one standing, the last one dancing in the street, and he would bask in the heat, letting it seep in through his shirt and skin. He would hold it contained and controlled within him, never to escape.
He remembers sneaking in through the back door of his house, never earlier than 2 in the morning, taking the utmost care in shutting the noisy screen door and slowly padding up the stairs to his room. No one ever heard, Hoya’s execution was perfect.
One night, though, when he opens the back door, there’s a tall dark figure standing in the door way.
“Where have you been?” his father asks.
“Out.”
Hoya tries to brush by him, but his father doesn’t move. Instead, he shoves a sheet of paper under Hoya’s nose. Hoya doesn’t even need to look to know what it is. His school report, previously hidden at the back of his desk drawer. He also doesn’t need to look at it to know that he’s failing more than one class.
“I told you to stop wasting your time, but you’re still dancing in the streets like an idiot! There are more important things than your dumb friends and this crazy obsession!”
“I’m quitting school. I’m going to Seoul and I’m going to dance.” The words fall out before he can think to stop them. He suddenly feels warmer, the heat that seeped into his skin every night boiling his blood.
A loud smack rings out into the night. Hoya feels his cheek sting.
“You will not.”
The stinging subsides and Hoya feels his cheek begin to burn. He touches his fingers to the side of his face and is amazed at how hot it is, hotter than any part of him before. It’s a small sun, burning the outside of his cheek, and some of it spreads to the rest of his head: To his brain, and then to his mouth.
“Yes, I will. Actually, yes I am. I owe nothing to this dump anyway. I don’t need anything here, and I don’t need you.”
Hoya shuts the door. He turns and walks down the street. He hears the door open behind him, and his walk turns into a jog, then a run, and finally a full on sprint. He smiles wildly as he sprints, exuberant, celebrating each stride that takes him closer to a bus to Seoul and further away from this place, this place where he had no power, where he had only been known as a failure. Even as he begins to gasp for breath, he doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow. His smile merges with his gasps, and his eyes burn with fire, like headlights showing the way ahead.
He had been really stupid.
Hoya wouldn’t have run half so fast if he had realized that Seoul would just be another Busan. All that defiance and effort for nothing. It would have been better if he had just stayed home. After Infinite collapsed, he would have to return, head bowed, finally and soundly defeated, and he knew who would be waiting for him when he opened that back door again.
Hoya sits down heavily, lowering his face to his hands.
“Yeah, it was, and now it’s gone, extinguished,” he groans. “I’m so tired now, I’m so cold.”
Dongwoo pulls Hoya’s hands away from his face and lays his own hand on Hoya’s cheek. Hoya doesn’t react. Maybe it’s because his cheek is so cold, but he’s surprised at the hand’s warmth. It pulses against his cheek with a steady beat.
When fire, that endless desire to move forward and live, and ice, that immovable reality of what lies at the end of every life, collide, there is water.
Dongwoo sees Hoya’s cheeks flush below his fingers. A drop of water trickles between his fingers, and he realizes that Hoya is silently crying. Dongwoo lets his own tears fall then, overflowing from his eyes.
That night, Hoya searches through his closet until he pulls out a small, brownish-purple, leatherbound notebook. These next seven days might be all that he has left with Dongwoo. He feels that they deserve to be recorded, remembered in some concrete fashion.
When he opens the journal, a photo falls out from behind the inside cover, hitting the floor with a small “clap.” Hoya picks it up and sees his father, mother, older and younger brother, and himself smiling up at him. It’s a family portrait from a long time ago, before he debuted. He turns it over, already knowing what’s written there.
“I’ll return when I’m successful.”
It’s written boldly in sharpie in the center of the back. His named is signed underneath it, as if it’s an official declaration.
Hoya holds the photo in his hand for a minute, flipping it back over to examine his family’s faces. They’re all dressed in their best clothing, his father in a suit too big for him, his mother in a handmade dress. They’re all positioned perfectly to compliment each other’s heights, carefully spaced to give the photo a cozy but not crowded feel. His father sits to on the left side of the picture; behind him, his youngest son. The mother sits to the right, her eldest son’s hand on his shoulder, and Hoya stands in the middle.
Hoya trades the photo for a purple pen from his bag. He brings the pen and journal out to the foyer and sits at the desk where Dongwoo used to write every night. He stares at the first blank page and slowly sets his pen down at the top.
The digital clock on the desk flashes as the seconds tick by and a circle of ink slowly grows around the tip of his pen. This day is one of seven left, and it carries immense, inconceivable significance. 23 years of a life and 4 years of friendship all come to rest on the top of Hoya’s pen, waiting to pour out onto the paper.
Only ink unformed by sentences or ideas pours out, though. Hoya doesn’t even know where to start. There’s so much to say, and yet he can’t think of anything worth saying. He lifts his pen from the paper to stop the constant spread of dark ink.
As each hour ticks by, the day weighs more heavily on him. He’s wasting time. He sits, doing absolutely nothing, as one of those last precious days slips by. He stares at the blank page, marred by a black dot, and forces himself to think. Words and phrases rush through is mind in frenzied bursts (“Today, Dongwoo…” “In seven days…” “I feel…”) but all of them sound trite and unfeeling, incapable of expressing what is happening. How do you sum up a friendship in a diary entry? How do you close a friendship in seven days?
Despite his efforts, the frequency of the sentence fragments rushing through his head decrease until his head is empty. His eyes droop and Hoya falls asleep at the desk.
He throws on a shirt and sweatpants, and slips out of his bedroom. He sees Dongwoo sitting at the living room desk, reading a book, and pauses.
Dongwoo checks his watch. 4:00 AM. He looks up.
“Going to practice?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” Dongwoo slips the book into his bag and, with a soft sigh, stands up. He walks over to the front door and slips on his shoes.
Dongwoo is sitting in the back right corner of the dance studio. He bounces his patica back and forth, following the steady heavy beat in his chest.
Over his beat, Dongwoo hears the squeaks of Hoya’s sneakers moving across the polished floor.
Hoya’s mind is blaring Infinite’s new track at max volume, branding the beat into his brain, but he can still hear the steady incessant thuds of Dongwoo’s patica. The beat had been quiet and unassuming when Dongwoo had started, as it usually was, melding into the background beats of Hoya’s dance. Today, though, it’s changed into something else, an inescapable stream of sound, and Hoya feels like he’s drowning in it. He does everything he can to resist it. He ups the speed of his mental recording, trying to outrun that beat, even though every fiber of his body winces at the separation and recoils at the discordance between the two competing rhythms. He steps harder, rubbing the soles of his shoes in the ground, but, although shaper, the squeaks of his shoes on the ground are short and fleeting in comparison to Dongwoo constant beat.
Hoya just wants this practice to take them back to before, back when they had nothing to fear, when dancing with Dongwoo was so easy.
Hoya stops dancing and walks over to Dongwoo, resisting the urge to slap the patica out of his hand.
“Dongwoo, get up. Dance with me.”
Dongwoo smiles up at him, seemingly oblivious to his stormy mood, pockets his patica and stands up. Hoya plays the Infinite track from his iPod and Dongwoo walks with him to the center of the room. There’s a moment of apprehension before the track starts, because Dongwoo remembers that he hasn’t really danced in 2 weeks. As the song begins, though, he listens to it, letting it fill him, and the dance flows smoothly as water.
Dongwoo throws his elbows back, striking the first beat, and winces. Hoya pounds out every move, beside him, but Dongwoo quietly minimizes the choreography, simplifying the movements, bringing only the essentials. He focuses on linking the movements together smoothly instead of hitting each of them on the beat. Somehow, in this damaged state, his movements have more fluidity than ever before.
Next to Hoya, he barely seems to be moving, and yet there’s an understated weight to his movement, an inertia in his slight frame that makes each movement powerful, like an added layer to a growing snowball.
The song ends and Dongwoo bends over, completely out of breath. Hoya’s already moving again, dancing to the next song on his playlist (a quick-paced rap song). Dongwoo laughs and raises his left hand in half of a surrender.
“Alright, I’m done,” he says, walking back to his corner and taking a seat. He slips his hand to his back pocket, fishing for his patica…
Suddenly, Hoya’s there, grabbing his arm and pulling it away from his pocket, tugging him upwards.
“Come on, Dongwoo, when you come back, you need to be in top shape.” Hoya tugs on his hand again, like an impatient dog straining on his leash.
“I told you that I’m tired,” Dongwoo whines good naturedly, pulling his hand away from Hoya’s grip.
Hoya reaches down to pull him up again. “You have to push yourself, it’s the only way you’ll get better. Come on, Dongwoo, let’s go. Get up.”
Dongwoo sighs and swallows, then forces himself to speak.
“Hoya, I’m not coming back to Infinite for at least a year, maybe longer. And even then… I don’t know if I can get better.”
Hoya’s face freezes and then hardens as he suddenly thinks that this isn’t the Dongwoo he knew, the Dongwoo who promised to be always be there and always was, working and sweating alongside him…
And in that freezing of expression, Dongwoo suddenly catches a glimpse of the other side of Hoya. Not a man who dared to stand up and challenge the world, but a boy who never took no for an answer, and when the universe went on without regard for his dissent, and night fell, he feared the darkness and ran way, trying to outpace the setting of the sun. He lit his path with burning bridges and built the walls around himself high and deep. Even within those walls, though, he could never truly escape the shadows he feared, but shut up all alone his screams only escaped in the sound of an occasionally squeaking shoe against a waxed practice room floor.
There was one person who could hear him now, one person he had hesitantly let into his walls, only making that allowance because he had never met someone quite so open and willing. And he had told that person about all the bridges he had burned to keep the darkness at bay. Now, though, that person had betrayed him, like a Trojan horse carrying deep darkness inside of its belly. As he felt the world turn on him again, he begins to run again, burning bridges to light his path… He easily sheds the last eight years like a shining snake slithering out from an old skin, but Dongwoo is left all alone, with nowhere to go, forced to face the oncoming darkness and it’s not fair, it’s really not fair.
“Hoya, look at me.” He doesn’t. “Look at me!” He looks at Dongwoo from the corners of his eyes, as if Dongwoo was like the sun, and too look directly at him was too dangerous.
“Hoya, do you think that it’s easy for me to watch from the sidelines, bound to a bed, when I should be onstage with you? Do you think it’s easy for me to sit quietly, with those withered flowers, feeling Infinite, feeling myself, slowly fade into irrelevance? I wanted to write classics, I wanted to be remembered! But this is all I get to say!” Dongwoo sighs with exasperation, his arms dropping for a moment to retrieve his notebook from his bag.
“Seven years. Seven years are recorded in this book. Almost every day from the moment we debuted onwards. I read it cover to cover in one night.” A panicked feeling rises in his throat and he rips out a couple pages from the middle and throws them to the floor. “Four years gone in the blink of an eye!”
He grabs Hoya, who has been standing absolutely still, again. Dongwoo grits his teeth as he pulls Hoya’s shoulders straight so that they can fully face each other.
“You can’t choose what part of me you see. I am the dancer and the cancer. I am an idol and this wreck of atrophied muscles. Hoya, listen, you must listen. You need to understand. There might be no ‘better.’”
Dongwoo feels like he’s in a dream as he takes a cab to the hospital, checks in, and sits in the waiting room. That rising sense of anxiety had haunted him for the past weeks, and he had constantly felt like he was struggling to keep his head above water. After he had told Hoya, the water had jammed itself into his throat, and then risen to his ears. He had slowly swallowed, forced the water down. The roaring in his ears subsided, and he was able to breathe again. He had left, and Hoya had continued to stare straight ahead, as if his expression was frozen in ice.
Everything now feels so easy, though, as if a current is gently pushing his feet along. Before he knows it, he’s in the doctor’s office and the doctor implants a port under the skin in the inside of his arm. The port is connected to a wire, which runs through the port, inside Dongwoo’s body, and straight to his heart.
There are a couple blood tests, but soon the doctor hooks up an IV to Dongwoo’s port and, just like that, the chemotherapy starts. Dongwoo hears the steady beat of his heart from the beeps of an EKG machine, and he gets the idea to reach for his patica, but he falls asleep before his hand reaches his bag.
Dongwoo’s in the river again, on the edge of that abyss. He’s walking with it, matching his pace with its speed. The current moves in small eddies around his feet, quietly brooding.
As he continues to walk forward, the stream suddenly becomes insistent again, swelling up to his mid-calf and pushing him towards the abyss.
“Whoa there,” Dongwoo says, laughing a little. “We’ll get there. No need to rush.”
The river doesn’t listen, though. It rises to his knees and now Dongwoo is running to keep up with its pace, his heart pounding erratically in his chest.
Dongwoo wakes up to the beeps of the EKG machine. There’s something weird about the beeps though; they are too harsh, too urgent, too fast.
Nurses surround him, and a doctor rushes in. After taking a glance at the EKG, he begins to check the IV bags. Dongwoo tries to stand up, but he collapses back into his chair, wheezing. It’s suddenly very hard to breathe. The doctor grabs an oxygen mask from behind the chair and covers Dongwoo’s nose and mouth with it, instructing him to take deep breaths.
Dongwoo takes shallow ones, struggling against whatever is blocking his lungs, and he sinks into unconsciousness.
Hoya is still staring at the practice room wall, but instead he sees a waterfall, its sheet of water disappearing some 20 feet below in a boiling mass of spray and foam. He then realizes that he’s standing at the edge of the waterfall, looking down. He’s right where he stopped earlier, where Dongwoo’s words had caught him and fed a fire, which evaporated any water that came close to him.
But now the fire was gone, extinguished by those new words from Dongwoo. I am dying. Hoya panics as he hears the roar of water in his ears, and a second later the wall of water hits, throwing him over the edge of the waterfall and down, down down.
Hoya’s body falls to the floor of the dance studio as he hits the bottom of the waterfall. He sinks like a stone beneath the surface of the water. He tries to claw his way back up, randomly slicing the water, but his limbs become heavy and cold. The feeling spreads to the rest of his body, until Hoya lies under the surface, motionless, drowning as he lets the undertow sweep him away.
Arriving at the dance studio after breakfast, the other members find Hoya curled in a ball in the center of the room, shivering.
Anaphylactic shock. It explained the heightened heart rate and the shortness of breath, along with the new rash on his arm and back. Dongwoo was allergic to the chemotherapy that was supposed to cure him. Just his luck.
However, his allergic reaction did not explain everything. Not Dongwoo’s new cough a few hours later, or the familiar sensation in his gut that seemed to hold a knife to Dongwoo throat, only vaguely uncomfortable now but poised to become something much more if he moved the wrong way.
The doctors, in ascertaining the cause of the chemotherapy incident, performed some tests, tests which should have been relatively simple but quickly led to more, until they finally came across the results that did explain everything.
The cancer had moved silently but swiftly, and where there had been one tumor before, two were growing in its place. As they had feared, the tumor had metastasized and, carried by his bloodstream, its fragments had found their way to his lungs, where they slowly and malignantly grew
Dr. Park was frank with Dongwoo. He sat by his bed and looked him in the eyes as he outlined the possible treatment options. They could operate again to remove the tumors, but with the cancer metastasized, it was likely that they would simply show up somewhere else. They could go forward with the chemotherapy, also using rapid desensitization to mitigate Dongwoo’s allergic reaction, but with his liver compromised, Dr. Park wasn’t sure how well his body would react to the toxic chemicals.
As he talked, the statistics on liver cancer Dognwoo had looked up on his laptop ran through his head. Renal cell carcinoma. Especially present in the Asian male population because of childhood liver cirrhosis, with a mortality rate of 10.7%, although much lower for younger patients. It was all information he’d looked up in an attempt to grasp what was happening to him.
“Even if the chemotherapy is effective, it will be largely palliative. It could shrink the tumors and give you some extra time if your body reacts well. Without it you have a week to a month, with it you may have a couple months and perhaps longer if it goes well. The chances of a cure are very low.”
The problem was, there had been very little to grasp, very little to understand. The probabilities and statistics ceased to have meaning. They had told him that he had a 5% chance of death, and many years left to live, but now Dongwoo knows that he has a 99% chance of death, and only some weeks to live.
Dongwoo looks up and sees the doctor looking at him expectantly, waiting for his response.
“I’ll sleep on it,” he says.
The doctor nods. “That’s fine.” He leaves.
They had tried to shake and shout Hoya out of it, but he hadn’t moved, and eventually they had no choice except to carry him back to the dorm. Sungyoel and Woohyun lay him on the couch in the living room.
Dongwoo doesn’t come back form the hospital. The day drags on and the afternoon wanes. One of the managers calls Dongwoo, but he doesn’t pick up. The managers then get into the van and drive to the hospital. A couple hours later, the members get a text from Dongwoo:
“There were some complications. I’ll be staying in the hospital for a while.”
None of the members mention the message, but the five drawn and confused faces make it clear that everyone received it. Hoya, though, continues to lay on the couch with a blank expression on his face. Woohyun sits on the floor by the coach, resting his head near Hoya’s feet and looking towards the blank TV screen. When Hoya doesn’t respond, he stands up and goes back to his room, trying to make the movement casual, but failing miserably.
Hoya stares at the ceiling and drifts off to sleep on the couch. Later he’s woken by the return of the managers from the hospital. He remains on the couch as they call the other members into the living room, and their upturned fearful yet expectant faces emerge quickly.
The managers, though, pull out a packet of papers and begin to go through the details of that night’s performance. It’s a music program special, featuring all the most popular groups and hits of the year. The managers tell them that they’ll be back in a couple hours to make sure everyone’s dressed and ready, and then leave.
Sunggyu walks into the foyer and begins to put on his shoes, and the other members follow him. Hoya, though, remains on the couch. The members dutifully file through the door, until only Sunggyu is left standing with his hand on the open door. “Hoya.” No response. “Are you coming to practice?”
“I’m fine.”
Sunggyu lingers. No one, though, can really argue that Hoya needs to practice more, and Hoya shows no signs of changing his mind. Sunggyu is too wiped to even try, so he shuts the door behind him.
Between two couch cushions Hoya’s hand finds the TV remote. His finger taps the power button, and the news flickers on the screen. His eyes stare at it, surrendering his thoughts to the constant stream of bland voices and faces.
Infinite returns in an hour, silently flowing around Hoya like a stream around a rock. When the managers return, they toss a set of clothing at each of the members and check their watches, urging them to hurry.
Dongwoo is sitting on the gray sandy riverbed, letting the shallow water flow around him. He’s been sitting here for a while now, thinking and waiting.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
The sound rips through the quiet shifting of water. Dongwoo closes his eyes and tries to ignore the noise, but it becomes louder and more urgent, until he can detect that it’s coming from above.
With an annoyed “tch,” Dongwoo stands up and cranes his neck back, looking up. As usual, though, there’s only the gray moon above, shedding light that looks like its been filtered through many sieves, until it only drizzles the water below.
Suddenly, the water begins to rise around him, covering his torso, and then his head in a blink of an eye. It continues to rise and Dongwoo swims with it, pulling himself upward, eyes fixed on the faint light above. It only takes a few seconds before his chest is aching for air and his head feels light. His vision begins to flicker, covering that soft light with blotches of black, and it’s so tempting to just close his eyes and let himself be suspended in place by the lukewarm water, and then float downwards. His eyelids slowly fall, but with one final burst of effort, Dongwoo lunges forward, forcing his eyes open against the water.
Dongwoo wakes to the familiar sound of his alarm clock. He automatically pulls his earbuds out of his ears and switches off his iPod while reaching for the TV remote with his other hand.
There’s a small clock in the bottom right corner of the screen, but Dongwoo’s vision is too blurry to read it. He rubs his eyes with the back of one of his hands and squints at the small numbers. Is it 6 o’clock? It looks like 6 o’clock.
Dongwoo pinches himself a couple times over the course of the next 15 minutes of the usual simpering MC-ing. He’s gone through this routine plenty of times over the last couple weeks, but he never remembers it being quite so hard. He never felt that he had to struggle just for his own consciousness. Probably just a side effect of the drugs administered by IV, but Dongwoo can’t help the chill that runs down his spine.
The other members are pacing around the dressing room. Woohyun randomly belts out the beginning of the refrain, while L mutters his lines while staring blankly into the mirror. They look self-absorbed, but each gives Hoya, sitting silently in a corner, their share of uneasy looks. The silence is not the quiet concentration they’ve come to expect form Hoya before performances, an intense silence which could almost be felt in the air around him. This silence is empty, a vacuum.
Six men stand backstage, occasionally peering with wide eyes at the flashing lights which illuminate the stage, their hearts pounding in their chest along with the beat of the music and the cheers of the fans. One of them, though, looks at the lights with his head tilted and brows furrowed, perplexed. He wonders, how could lights which he knew were supposed to be bright and colorful appear so insipid and pale? How could the music, which he knew should be pounding in his ears, and the cheers, which should be resonating in his chest, sound so inane?
The stage managers motion for them to go on stage. Woohyun claps Hoya’s shoulder as he walks by him with a good natured “You ready?” Hoya doesn’t react. As Sunggyu passes him he briefly wonders if perhaps he should say something, but the MCs have already called their name, he can’t risk the other members, or really his own, state of mind by making a scene right now. All of them are walking on ice, trying to pick their way around the thinnest sections, but Sunggyu never guessed that Hoya would be the first to plunge through and freeze solid.
All the members are standing with their back turned towards the audience, already in their formation, but Hoya stares at the audience with that same perplexed look on his face. The fans erupt, shouting Hoya’s name and waving their banners. Hoya, though, does not smile. He looks into the sea of smiling faces, the faces of girls who had just sent Dongwoo “get well soon” flowers a couple days ago, but who were now here, deliriously, stupidly, happy, cheering on Infinite without a care in the world. How could they keep on living happily when Dongwoo was dying? How dare they.
Hoya turns from them and wanders to his spot. He feels Sungyu’s eyes burning into the back of his head.
The first note of the song cuts through Hoya’s muffled hearing, hot and shining in his brain, hissing like a hot iron shoved into a bucket of ice. It’s painful, and Hoya’s brain blocks itself off from his ears, flinching away from the song until it is as muffled as everything else, leaving his body to go through the requisite motions.
The first note of a performance has never failed to get Dongwoo’s heart racing. It’s one of the strongest feelings he knows, like his body is pulled taut like the membrane across a drum when a mallet descends from above and strikes it.
Even tonight, in his hospital bed, Dongwoo feels it. He sees it change the other members, too. Coming onto the stage, they had all looked fragile, even with the concealing make up and flashy clothes. The moment that first note struck, though, their hands come up, their shoulders are thrown back, and they easily glide into their formations. Dongwoo dances with them, moving his shoulders and the hand less encumbered by wires in simplifications of their movements, the hospital bed creaking softly under his shifting weight.
As Dongwoo watches, though, he feels that something is off. Its as if a machine has lost one screw, but still chugs along, albeit less powerfully.
Hoya’s rap, his turn to claim the stage. He emerges from the group, and instead of bursting forth with a power that was reserved for his solo moments, he now seems smaller without the group surrounding him. He drops his phrases in a close enough approximation of their usual rhythms, and before Dongwoo knows it, he’s disappeared, melding back into the group, his presence reduced to that slightly “off” feeling. The camera quickly switches to Sunggyu, his lips thinly set, relieved of its obligation to focus on Hoya during his rap, but Dongwoo continues to follow Hoya in the background of each shot. He sees that he’s dancing just like he rapped, moves thoughtlessly placed around where they seem they should belong.
Dongwoo twists his fingers nervously as he hears his own rap approaching. All he can see now, in every shot, is Hoya, being dragged along behind the performance. He can see the machine chugging along without its screw, the parts slowly becoming looser, threatening to break apart with a spectacular crash at any moment. Dongwoo doesn’t want to see this, he wants to turn off the TV. This isn’t some worn out rehearsal that he can excuse and ignore, though. It’s a performance broadcast to thousands, and Dongwoo can’t deny that it’s happening and real.
His rap hits. The other members fall silent, dancing as the backtrack blares.
There’s nothing else. Just backtrack.
The camera swings to Hoya, but he’s in the back, dancing his old part with the other members, his eyes blank.
Hoya’s back underwater, lying in a block of ice at the bottom of the river. It’s the only place where he can be safe, where there is nothing, no pain, only his numbness. Something sparks and then sputters for a moment, like a shadow caught in his peripheral vision, and Hoya watches himself dance with a detached passing interesting. He’s about to turn away when something strikes him as odd. Why are they just dancing to the backtrack? Shouldn’t someone be singing? He looks at all the other members, but they stare right back at him. Not singing then… rapping. But why are they all looking him? He’s already done his verse…
Oh.
Shit shit SHIT.
Hoya begins to thrash, punching and kicking at the ice that surrounds him. He manages to punch a hole through the ice, and the music gets louder as he uses one hand to claw his way towards the surface.
Gradually his hand begins to push less desperately against the water. He stops pulling himself upwards, his ascent decelerates, until he finally stops, suspended in the water, and then begins to fall again.
He can see Infinite silently panicking, but Hoya continues his dance in the background. Underwater, bound in ice, he shrugs. Dongwoo is dying, and when he dies he will bring Infinite with him. He can’t save this performance, it’s already too late. Infinite, and everything he ever wanted, was already dead in the water.
Hoya feels the cold ice refreezing over him, numbing the painful echoes in his head. The last thing he sees before everything before turning away is Sungyeol stepping out of the group, hesitantly and then smoothly picking up Dongwoo’s rap from where it lies, dead, on the stage.
Dongwoo smiles as Sungyeol delivers his lines, his voice a little unsteady, but earnestness as blunt as ever. He continues to watch Hoya in the background of each shot. He’s sure that, for a second, Hoya’s eyes had widened with recognition, but by the next shot the look had been wiped from his face and he looked perfectly stoic.
After the performance is over, Dongwoo switches off the TV. Reaching into his bag, he picks out his diary and flips it open. It naturally opens to its middle crease, where those two words are written:
The end.
What an end it is, with one member in the hospital with liver cancer and the other ones falling one by one, like dominoes. He steadies his breathing with deep breaths. He grabs a pen from the bedside table and lays its tip against the page.
The blank page stares up at him, those two words emblazoned at its top. He realizes that, like dancing, he hasn’t written in the last couple of weeks. He’s scared to go back to it, scared that maybe he won’t be able to do it for some reason. Slowly, hesitantly, he ekes out a couple words on the page, the ink like footprints on freshly fallen snow. Having disrupted the domain of those two words, though, his thoughts easily flow into sentences, then paragraphs, and then pages:
Probability’s a funny thing. I was told that I would probably survive this thing, but now I find that I probably won’t. I’m told that the chemo probably won’t work. What does that word, probably, even mean? What does it count for if its not certain?
The probability of dying while driving a car are much higher than those of dying in a plane, but almost everyone is more scared of flying than driving.
But you know, when I drive… it’s totally different. When I fly, I’m stuck in this small gray cylinder and there’s nothing to do but trust the statistics and a pilot I’ve never met before. In a car, though, my hands are on the steering wheel, my foot’s on the pedal, and the wind is in my hair… it reminds me of that time my dad was sick, when I was running to the pharmacy.
The difference is that when I’m in the car, I feel like I’m in control. I guess that’s just how I am. I mean, what were the chances of me becoming a successful idol? 1 in a 100 thousand? 1 in a million? But I thought that it would happen, that I would make it happen, and somehow, by some miracle, it did.
Well, a miracle and a lot of other things. You know, being rejected by JYP, being accepted by Woolim, happening to be put in a band with that guy who seems to burn with the power of a sun. Those things alone don’t make an idol, though, don’t make me. A miracle, an outstretched arm, does nothing on its own. Being rejected from JYP isn’t a miracle, choosing to go on to Woollim afterwards is. Meeting Hoya isn’t a miracle, building a friendship over 8 years is.
There seem to be general rules, taking the shape of probabilities, for how the Infinite goes about doing things. There are always those individual anomalies, though. The Infinite is not an unstoppable force, taking and destroying everything in its path. It exercised a certain give and take, more like the waves at the shore than a stream.
Dongwoo is back on the gray sandy shore, a dark shore that doesn’t separate land from sea, but rather surface and abyss. He feels the tide around his ankles, flowing forward, pushing him towards the abyss, and then ebbing, drawing back and releasing its pressure. Dongwoo leans forward a little, peering into the abyss, and then leans back, looking at the surface behind him.
As he looks at the surface he’s brought back to his hospital bed. He flips back a couple pages and scratches out those two words at the top of the page methodically, with leaving dents on the other side of the page, until those two words disappear under a new rectangle of shining black ink.
When the alarm goes off, Dongwoo turns on the TV before he shuts it off. He gets up to move some withered flowers that block the screen, and then settles back on top of the sheets. Propping his head on his elbow, he watches the performances intently. There’s a slew of younger acts, their clothes and make up looking too bright and big on their pale nervous faces as they deliver their lines with the exaggeration they had probably laughed at some years ago, but were now taught to execute themselves. Plenty of theoretically charismatic movements with all actual charisma suppressed behind a pair of wide unblinking eyes. Of course, a couple new groups impress with their relative lack of affectedness, which includes the rookie group they lost to only 2 weeks ago, groups that perhaps had some potential for future success embedded in their formula, if only a hundred other random factors resulted in perfect play. Dongwoo remembers when Infinite was like that, and watching their performance now it’s even more apparent how they’ve grown into professionals, where even the absence of a member barely shows.
The show nears its end and Dongwoo leans in. It’s the same as before, between Infinite and the rookie group. Dongwoo chews his cheek as he watches the numbers come on the screen. They each flash for only a second, but he can do the math and once again before the winner is announced he knows.
Dongwoo shuts off the TV and lets the darkness fall over him. The only sound is the occasional soft crunch of a flower petal hitting to the ground.
It really shouldn’t be a big deal, they were lucky enough to win last week. It was just tha Dongwoo seemed to be getting better, and it seemed like that pattern would continue, was meant to continue, tonight. Fortune was righting itself from its stumble.
Since they were trainees, they’d been called “Infinite.” They’d repeated their mantra, “Infinite potential,” over and over again. They lived by that phrase, that anything was possible if they worked hard. They offered 18 hour practice sessions like prayers for relevance and significance. Ironically, they had been right. Anything really was possible if you worked hard! Anything, including being taken out by a rookie group and one of your bandmates getting liver cancer.
They had christened themselves as Infinite: The almighty, the all-powerful. They were nowhere close to it, though. It was the rest of the world, the ever expanding Universe, that was truly Infinite.
That’s when Dongwoo realizes that the Infinite doesn’t work in patterns, giving them hints or suggestions. It simply is, and it certainly doesn’t give a shit about seven Korean boys who had the presumption to wear its names like ill-fitting king’s robes.
Dongwoo stirs when he hears the click of the door opening and the shuffling of feet. He leaves his room and walks to the foyer, a timid smile laid in place as he hears the sound of shoes being kicked off.
“You guys were great,” he says, loosely laying his hand on Sungjong’s arm. He expects some small touch back, but Sungjong reciprocates nothing, and when Dongwoo looks at his face he realizes that it looks dead, too tired to respond to anything around it.
Dongwoo brushes each member’s arm with his fingertips as they file past him to their bedrooms, and he sees the same look in all of their eyes.
All of them, that is, except for Hoya. His eyes look like they glimmer with ember, and when Dongwoo touches his arm, it’s feverishly hot. Hoya’s arm flinches under Dongwoo’s consoling touch, probably just by instinct. His stride quickly overtakes the other members, and, reaching his bedroom first, he slams the door behind him.
The other members slowly find their rooms and slip in, like lost children. They are so quiet that Dongwoo can hear the harsh beeps of Hoya’s alarm clock as he sets his alarm for tomorrow. He can imagine Hoya’s finger jabbing the button of the alarm clock, trying to force the plastic to understand how essential this alarm is for him. The alarm clock only offers its tinny beats in response.
Dongwoo waits in the living room, sitting on the couch, after all the members enter their bedrooms. After a few minutes, he silently opens each door to make sure that every member has settled in. He doesn’t check Hoya’s room, though, he has a feeling that he wouldn’t appreciate the gesture. Hoya is independent, his fire burns brightest when he stands alone, when the whole world seems turned against him. He will not, can’t, take no for an answer. That’s what people see when Hoya’s on stage.
Dongwoo sits down at his desk in the living room, a habit which still feels familiar even after being neglected for two weeks, and, out of habit, unthinkingly, a smooth continuation of the sitting down motion, unfolds his arm to the left drawer, his fingers pushing aside a hidden panel in the back. Reaching in, he pulls out his journal.
He lets the book flip open and the flurry of its pages comes to a rest on Nov 21st, 2013. The day before he was taken to the hospital, and the first time they had lost in a long time. The entry only contains two words:
“The End.”
Dongwoo flips to the beginning of the book and begins to read.
Dongwoo sits in the dance studio during their practices, watching, and occasionally helping to tighten up parts of the choreography. The other Infinite members bring back flowers from their events, gifts from Inspirits to Dongwoo.
Sometimes, Hoya sees Dongwoo wince, or hears him grunt when he stands up, but Dongwoo always bounces back to his usual smiling self. The pills the doctor gave Dongwoo remain unopened in the bathroom cupboard, and one day, while brushing his teeth, Hoya moves them behind some of the other vitamins in the cabinet. If Dongwoo notices, he doesn’t say anything.
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