More than Luhan’s conspiracy theory, it was the man sitting infront of me who intrigued me. Fate could play some funny games, considering how Byun Baekhyun looked so much like his grandfather but hardly resembled the man who my father used to talk about so much. A visionary, a pioneer, a dreamer… but sitting infront of me was a rationalist, a pragmatist, and a realist. Someone who didn’t take any bull. Someone who thought our friend Luhan was borderline schizophrenic.

“Hey, you’re not actually going to do this are you?”

Baekhyun was giving me his signature skeptical grin, as if he knew exactly what was going on in my mind.

“I’ve known Luhan for a long time,” I shrugged. “If he’s hellbent on something, nothing can stop him.”

“But he called us because he needed our resources,” he said. “If he really could do this without us, he would have done it already. This is foolish, you know that. There’s nothing in that damn photograph and no one cares.” I noticed how he didn’t care whether Luhan could hear him or not. Our friend was busy discussing the new menu with the childish looking waiter who I had to admit, was cute. Baekhyun stared at me, awaiting a response. I tore my eyes away from the two at the bar and sighed.

“My father has always been passionate about this venture.”

“So was my grandfather,” he instantly replied, waving towards the museum entry. “Look where that got him.”

“So are we doing this?” Luhan skipped towards us, anticipation gleaming in his eyes. Baekhyun gave me a once-over glance and took a deep breath in.

“Listen Luhan, we really discu—”

“We’re in.”

Even over Luhan’s delightful squeal and his long arms thrown around the two of us, I could see that Baekhyun was stumped. He looked betrayed, almost as if I had broken a blood pact. With a tightened jaw and a furious look in his eyes, he turned around and stormed out of the garden.

“Are you sure he’s in?” Luhan whispered, as the two of us watched Baekhyun’s legs jog over to the other side of the road.

“He’ll come around,” I said, giving my old friend a reassuring smile. Luhan didn’t seem convinced but he smiled back. I returned my gaze to Baekhyun, who before boarding the bus, gave the museum an almost wistful gaze.

In that moment, I saw the man my father knew.

                                       **************************************************************************

My father had spent his entire life exhausting himself over this photograph. Rather than feeling resentment, I used to be inspired by the way Dad would persistently cling onto hypothesis after hypothesis. It was my father who taught me that information was the only Bible of mankind, an eternally locomotive avalanche of codes and words that wrote and rewrote our history everyday. Dad hated the proverbial ‘ignorance is bliss’ take on life and with the continous development of technology, no one was happier than my father when it came to Right to Information or a federal cover being blown or even a common group of netizens unravelling details that would have been overlooked without microscopic attention.

Despite that, I was not intending on telling him about this. After so many years of being laughed at, the last thing he needed was a break from his much-needed stupor. Dad had pretty much given up on this; time had eventually caught up with him and reminded him that he had a life to live. Luhan and I could work this out by ourselves, provided our stubborn friend Baekhyun let go of his ego and join us as well.

“Here’s your coffee.” Luhan offered me a mug and I murmured a ‘thanks’. He too rested his gaze on the photograph infront of us, the photograph that had saved my week from another doom of mundanity.

“I’m just curious Luhan,” I said. The steam from the coffee was burning my face. I lowered the mug and turned to face my friend. “Why are you doing this?”

The sound of footsteps distracted us and we turned around to see a couple entering this section of the museum. The girl with the leather jacket lazily draped over her floral dress rolled her eyes when her girlfriend pulled her towards us.

“You don’t want to see that,” Leather Jacket yawned. “I’ll show you something better, that was just something a lunatic propped up for money.”

The comment didn’t seem to provoke either of us but when I returned my attention to my friend, I was surprised by the dull lucidity on his face. He narrowed his eyes at the photograph then closed his eyes. Upon opening them, he spoke.

“There will always be people like them in this world. It’s because of them that the word ‘dreamer’ is synonmous with ‘unrealistic’, ‘evasive’, ‘lunatic’… But that’s not true, is it Suho? This photograph is as real as you and me. Both of us know that the distortion in this photograph is as real as what the distortion is hiding. The place is real, the crewmembers were real, and Baekhyun’s grandfather was a real living person. No, real isn’t as absolute as Baekhyun thinks it to be. Real isn’t tangible, it’s relative. But people like Baekhyun are scared of relativity and they’re scared of changes. They’re scared that the reality that society has accepted and kept fixed for future reference will be replaced by another reality, a reality that will change the way they are accepted, that will change any guarantee of their future. And us? We’re dreamers, they say. They say we’re the utopians, the ones who aren’t happy with this life and so we cook up things, don’t look at boundaries, don’t look at reality. They say we’re the idealists but that’s bull Suho. Do you know why?”

Luhan took a deep breath in and faced me, his eyes glowing. “Because the real idealists are realists. They are the ones who have created this idea of reality that is so restrictive and oppressive that it kills people everyday. It kills souls and dreams and possiblities and fools everyone into thinking that reality never changes and that the true face of reality is unidimensional. Their very illusion of reality has its roots fixed in a seabed so deep that whoever tries hard to take it out will die in the process. They’ll drown, just the way the reality of this photograph did. And do you know what I feel? I feel that Mr. Byun Baekhyun purposely rubbed out whatever he saw because he knew that if the world sees it, they’d be scared. They would eternally prosecute him to a life of shame and embarrassment and worst of all, maybe that reality hidden by those waves would attack society so fatally that everything we have ever believed would be destroyed on the spot. Baekhyun himself has succumbed to that idea of reality, that safe bubble that he knows he needs as a cocoon. That’s the reality he lives in Suho. The reality that doesn’t let him break out of that shell and become something beautiful, something bigger and better. And maybe deep inside, he too feels that I’m right about this but he doesn’t want to do anything. Not because he thinks this is stupid or that I’m just crazy. It’s because he doesn’t want to face the reality that actually exists. If that reality ever resurfaces, everything he has ever believed in would be useless. He’s afraid of that.”

A sharp silence ensued. I blinked at Luhan’s reddened face and from my peripheral gaze, saw a figure looking at us. I turned around, my eyes widening with recognition. Luhan followed my gaze and sighed.

“You talk well,” Baekhyun said, slowly approaching us with a box in his arms. I took a sip of my coffee and stepped away from the two, but he shook his head.

“It’s alright, no bad blood,” he said. He gave a stiff smile that seemed friendlier than his previous day’s Cheshire cat grin of nonchalance. He stared at the space between us and fumbled with the box.

“After I reached home yesterday,” Baekhyun said, resting the box on the floor and sitting on his knees, his thin fingers scouring through sheafs of paper. “I asked Mom if anything from grandfather’s study had been left behind. She handed me this box and told me that it was all nonsense. I could leave out the part where I told her this was for a harmless project but I’d like to let you know that I lied to my mother for the first time for this. Had it been for nothing, I would have been pissed. But then I found this.”

Baekhyun then handed a thick, worn-out Italian leather diary to Luhan. He stood up on his feet and pointed at a piece of butter paper sticking out from between the pages. “Don’t kiss me for this,” he winked.

“What are you talking about?” Luhan murmured as his hands flipped through the book and carefully removed the fragile sheet from its entrapment. I looked over his shoulder and saw a very rough, untidy set of sketches drawn on it. Luhan lifted the sheet against the light and the two of us spent a good number of seconds just boring a hole into it with our eyes.

“For sake, are you telling me you really don’t get it?” Baekhyun tapped at the drawing on the right, a flustered look on his face. “Look at the first sketch!”

I quirked an eyebrow at his eagerness, a questioning look that he ignored. I returned my attention to the drawing but Luhan had already gasped. Before Baekhyun had even spoken, I had seen the surprise he had given us --- the drawing on the right was identical to the photograph before us, but the sketch right next to it had the silhouette of a woman floating in the mist. The page that the sketch had bookmarked had a flurry of notes that once I started reading it, found to be tutorials and steps on how to distort a photograph.

“That means Luhan was right,” Baekhyun said, a strange smile on his face, a smile that spelt acceptance more than defeat. “Whatever it was that was there in the mist, grandfather voluntarily rubbed it out.”

“But why?” I murmured, even though the answer was echoing in my mind. Memories of my father cooped up in his dark study returned to me and the headache burned the back of my eyes.

Baekhyun blinked at the photograph. “The same thing Luhan just told you, that what grandfather saw would shake the very foundations of our reality. Not a price he wanted to pay, and definitely not a price he wanted the world to pay.”

Luhan and I glanced at each other. I cleared my throat. “So are you in?”

Baekhyun looked at me with a blank face and I almost expected him to storm off again. Suddenly he grinned and ruffled Luhan’s hair. “ yeah, I don’t like it when something’s hidden from me. No way am I getting one-upped by a dead man whose namesake was teased by the worst nickname in history.”

“Byun Baek,” Luhan whispered. I laughed out loud in disbelief when Baekhyun chased him out to the garden, laughing even more when Kyungsoo widened his eyes at Luhan’s failed reassurance that ‘constipation’ wasn’t the worst of the lot. 

I looked back at the photograph then glanced at the sketch of the woman. “I wonder why our old men hid you from the world.”

For a moment, it looked like the mist in the photograph had cleared up a little.