Light dark light dark light dark

            He looks at the ceiling through half open eyes, watching the bars of light appear, move over his head, disappear, and then reappear. He’s being wheeled by a nurse somewhere… what time is it?

            Dongwoo arrives at another room. The room, like almost everything else in the hospital, is painted a sterile white. The walls are empty except for outlets, from which wires run to the center of the room, where several large gray machines are crowded around a small teal operating table, brightly illuminated by 5 coned light bulbs. The whole set up gives the room a claustrophobic impression. A nurse fiddles with some drip bags and tubing as Dr. Park, barely recognizable behind his scrubs, asks Dongwoo how he’s feeling. Dongwoo mumbles something along the lines of what time is it, and the Dr. Park responds with a quiet “mm-hmm” as he helps Dongwoo to the bed in the center of the room and helps him to lie down. Taking a plastic nose and mouth mask from one of the machines, he places it over Dongwoo’s mouth and nose.

            “Breathe deeply in… and now out,” he instructs, as the other doctors and nurses begin to gather around the bed. Dongwoo’s eyes dart around, glancing at the people who surround the table apprehensively, before losing consciousness.

            Later, Dongwoo wouldn’t be sure if what he remembered from that morning was just a dream or not.

---

            He knows his eyes are open, but all he can see is a white blur. He watches it slowly resolve itself into the small bumps and ridges of the ceiling paint until he remembers that he has a body. He tries to lift his right arm, but nothing happens. It feels like a dead weight, pressing heavily against the side of his body. He tries to shift his legs, but they don’t move either.

            Dongwoo suddenly thinks that his limbs will never move again, that he’s trapped inside his own body. However, his brain digests the thought slowly, until the notion loses its shock and no longer warrants any type of bodily response, and that, somehow, is even more terrifying.

            As Dongwoo’s brain sluggishly begins to digest that thought as well, Dongwoo feels his right arm twitch. He concentrates on the twitch and slowly, he’s able to shift his arm under the sheets, which are stretched taut and crisp across his chest. Hesitantly, he tries his other arm and legs. They too, move under the sheets, albeit sluggishly, as if there’s some lag between his brain and body.

            Dr. Park walks in. He asks how he’s doing. Dongwoo manages to form the word “Fine” around his lips. Dr. Park then shows him a small black button by his left hand, which he can press to pump more painkiller into his bloodstream when the pain gets worse.

            “Pain?” Dongwoo asks.

            Oh.

            His stomach is burning, pinched, and tender where the sutures hold him together. Under the stitches there’s a dull ache, uneasily reminiscent of the pain which they had operated to remove. It makes him uncomfortable in his own body, as his insides aren’t quite properly aligned, and any small movement will send them tumbling out.

            Dongwoo becomes effectively deaf to the rest of what Dr. Park has to say. He concentrates on lying stock still, no longer interested in moving his limbs, and gives a forced smile and nod of understanding, only so the doctor will leave. The button for the painkiller is right at his fingertips, but Dongwoo’s too scared to move.

            There’s a knock at the door, a grace note to the beat of Infinite bursting into the room. Hoya pulls aside the curtain surrounding Dongwoo’s bed and brandishes the trophy in his hand.

            “Look!” he yells, holding out the trophy, waiting for Dongwoo to take it. The other members crowd around the bed, their expectant faces shining. Dongwoo, though, doesn’t move. Instead, he responds with a strained smile.

            A beat later, Sunggyu turns away and clears some of the more dead flowers off the table across from Dongwoo’s bed, and Woohyun begins refilling the water in their vases. Hoya turns and sets the trophy down on the newly made clear space, and then drags his stool over to Dongwoo’s bed, after clearing it too of flowers.

            “How was the surgery?” He asks.

            “To be honest, I don’t really remember any of it,” Dongwoo croaks. He begins to laugh, but then winces and chokes down the sound, closing his eyes in concentration for a few seconds.

            Sungjong quickly takes hold of Dongwoo’s hand and soothingly tells him not too overexert himself, and Sungyeol earnestly agrees, pushing Dongwoo a little too hard in his enthusiasm and eliciting another wince. Hoya can’t even do that though. He stares straight at the bedsheets, his face a practiced blank mask. He feels squeamish looking at Dongwoo’s obvious discomfort, as if he’s peeking into something he shouldn’t, as if he accidentally caught sight of his friend . It seemed best to pretend he didn’t see any of it.

            Dongwoo opens his eyes again to smile at Sungjong and Sungyeol and the pain subsides enough to let him speak.

            “I just woke up about 30 minutes ago, and when I did Dr. Park was here telling me a bunch of stuff I didn’t understand,” he babbles.

            The members listen intently. Woohyun lays his hand against Dongwoo’s forehead, as if that can somehow give him an indication of Dongwoo’s health, but that makes Dongwoo start to laugh, and then wince again, and all the members wince around him.

Dongwoo’s eyes swivel to encompass the new tubing surrounding his body. “I’m like a porcupine (“Or a pineapple,” Myungsoo supplies) but I don’t know what any of my spines do…” His eyes land on the small black button by his left hand.

            “Oh, except for this one. This button’s for the painkiller.”

            He contemplates the button. It’s innocuous enough, just large enough to accommodate a pressing thumb. His fingers inch towards it.

            “Looks like you’re pretty popular,” Hoya gestures to the flowers in the hospital room.

            Dongwoo looks at Hoya. Hoya’s always been there, in the dance room, during practice, stoically, perhaps unknowingly, forcing Dongwoo to move forward, leading him through the practice from hell. That’s what Dongwoo always coveted, to be infinitely strong, so strong that he would never feel his own pain.

            “I’m not going to use the button.”

            Hoya looks surprised for a second, but then his face composes again. He understands.

            Hoya talks to Dongwoo to take his mind off the pain. He and the members tell Dongwoo about the music show last night, and Dongwoo just listens, smiling and occasionally laughing. The clarity of his clear piercing laugh, though, is always offset by a clouding of his face.  Sungyeol, Sungjong, and Woohyun make concerned noises and his arm when it happens, Myungsoo and Sunggyu remain quiet, and Hoya looks away. It’s more than he can stand, so he tries to think of something more serious to talk about.

            “How was the rap last night?” He asks.

            Dongwoo smiles. “It was great.”

            Hoya nods, but he’s looking at his hands, his eyes narrowed in confusion.

            “It doesn’t sound like you, though.”

            “It doesn’t have to; it’s yours. It’ll sound like me when I’m back to rap it.”

            Hoya shakes his head. “No, there’s something missing.” Dongwoo, of course, sensed it last night, too.

            “Just keep practicing. You’ll figure it out.”

            Hoya nods and Sunggyu stands up. Everyone’s been so focused on talking at Dongwoo for so long that only he has noticed the tiredness in Dongwoo’s voice. He grasps Dongwoo’s shoulder, looks at him sternly and saying, “Rest, and get better.” He turns to leave, and his shoulder brushes against Woohyun, signaling the other members to follow him as well. Hoya’s the last one out.

            “When do they say you can come home?” he says as he puts the stool back.

            “I’m not sure. Maybe in a couple of days?”

            “Let’s shoot for tomorrow, okay?” Hoya says, as if offering a business contract.

            Dongwoo smiles and nods. “Okay.”

            Hoya quietly shuts the door behind him. Dongwoo closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep.

            Dongwoo wakes up in pitch darkness with his hands curled around sweat-drenched sheets. Something stiff lands on his forehead. He can only see it as a dark silhouette blocking his vision, but he can feel its many clawed feet scuttling down his face. He hears the quiet crackle of its exoskeleton as it moves and suddenly, there are two pincers resting on his lips. Slowly, inexorably, they pull his mouth open, wedging themselves between his clenched teeth and cutting into his cheeks. Dongwoo tries to swat the thing off his face, but his hands and arms won’t move. He tries to keep his jaws shut but they’re weak against the thing’s inexorable pressure.

            When his mouth is propped open as far as it will stretched, feeling almost unhinged, the thing slips in, the sparse bristles on its back brushing the roof of his mouth as sharp feet scratch his tongue. It holds his mouth open as it slips down his throat. Dongwoo gags, trying to cough the thing out, but his own throat betrays him, enveloping the thing and pushing it, slowly but steadily, down his gullet.

            The thing lands somewhere in his stomach, and it feels like a large fly landing on an open wound. Dongwoo feels its solid weight as it sits still for a moment. Then, it begins to move.

            It starts with the quiet sloshing of fluids in his abdomen, and claws lightly scraping across his organs. Then, there’s a tentative tap on his stomach wall.

            Dongwoo freezes, holding his breath. He feels the tap come again, and then turn into a scrape, this time more sure. Suddenly, all 8 of the things claws are clamped to his stomach wall, shredding it as the thing burrows its way out. Dongwoo feels the thing rip his organs from their membranes and messily shove them behind as it moves forward and he screams as he

            Wakes up.

            Dongwoo can hear his own labored breathing as he stares, wide-eyed, at the ceiling. His hands are still curled around sweat stained sheets.  The pain is still there—Why is the pain still there? The skin on his stomach, and everything under it, burns. His left hand fumbles for the small black button, scrambling to position his thumb over it, but when he’s about to push it, he remembers.

            “I’m not going to use the button.”

            When Dongwoo was younger, he wanted to be an herbal doctor, just like his father and he had fetched ingredients or made simple mixtures for him and watched him perform acupuncture a few times. Whenever Dongwoo had been sick, his father treated him in the same way he treated his patients, without pharmaceutical medicine and if Dongwoo had a fever, he would lie on a bamboo mat, and his father would place a cold wash cloth on his forehead and Dongwoo would watch his father slowly, deliberately, get his mortar and pustule, pinch some ingredients from his medicine cabinet, and then, sitting cross legged on the mat beside him, add some water and grind the ingredients together. The same ingredients every time, in the same order, added as part of a comforting ritual.

            Once, Dongwoo’s father had warned him against using pharmaceutical medicines, those nondescript pills. He had told Dongwoo that, at first, they would make him feel better, but soon his body would grow dependent on those pills. He would feel numb to their effects, and then crave more and more of the medicine, until the only way he would be able to live was on the crutch of the pill.

            The idea had terrified Dongwoo as a child, and still does as his eyes follow the trail of the wire from the black button to a nondescript bag of clear fluid.

            Dongwoo lies in bed, every muscle pulled taut, his eyes fixed on the bag. It is amazing to him how difficult it is to lie an one position for hours; his muscles beg to be moved. Those pains, though, are nothing compared to the sinister gnawing in his stomach, constantly threatening to spill over to the side of “unbearable.”

            He closes his eyes, and he remembers Hoya’s face from the morning after their loss.  Hardened with determination as they the practice, eyes fixed on the mirror, Like stone, unmoved, almost inhuman while Dongwoo pants beside him; infinitely powerful, infinitely strong, infinitely persistent. Now it is Dongwoo’s turn. He would ignore the pain, and sweat through the night, and when the dawn broke he would stand victorious over the darkness.

Just then the pain twists in Dongwoo’s gut and he feels as if a white hot piece of steel has been stick into him. The pain forces the breath from his lungs with a strangled cry and Dongwoo feels his eyes moisten.

As Dongwoo’s mind begins to adjust to the pain, begins to slowly accept and smother it, when his lungs finally begin to take in air again, it comes again, ramming into his stomach suffocating him under the sheets and in the mattress.  Dongwoo sees black spots bloom across his vision…

He’s running to the pharmacy, no, not running, sprinting, his feet kicking up splatters of gravel and dirt as the sun beats down on him, burning the back of his neck. He takes deep gulping breaths of car exhaust as he passes the cars inching down the busy street, his eyes trained on a small white building in the distance.

Father is very sick. He’s lying at home with a pot for vomit beside his head and a high fever. Mama sits by his side, dabbing his brow and Dongwoo stands, awkwardly, in the doorway. He had made basic pastes, with a few herbs, the only recipes that he knew, and spread them on his father’s forehead and chest, but they didn’t seem to help at all. Mama turns to him and, fishing in her purse, hands him some paper bills. She instructs him to get some antibiotics from the pharmacy.

Dongwoo reaches the pharmacy, runs down the aisles, searching. When he finds the correct rack, he stops for a second, bending over and resting his hands on his bent knees, gasping, but by the next second he has straightened, grabbed the pills, and is on his way to the cash register. He buys the pills, bows his thanks, and sprints out the door.

For a moment, flying down that road amidst the wind, dust, and sun, Dongwoo feels like the protagonist of a movie. It feels like the most important moment of his life. Everything lies in a balance, and that balance will be tilted one way or the other, depending on how he moves.  Even as his breath wheezes out, emptying his lungs, and he feels that he can’t take another breath of air, Dongwoo widens his stride, acutely aware of his own importance right now.

When he gets home, he thuds to his knees by his father. He gestures towards the kitchen sink, unable to speak, and his sister gets him a cup of water. Dongwoo presses two small, unassuming white pills from an orange bottle into the cup of his left palm and lifts his father into an upright sitting position. Putting pressure on his father’s cheeks with his right hand, he opens his mouth and quickly brings his left hand over it, tossing in the pills. He then takes the cup from his sister and pours some water into his father’s mouth, and then he holds his mouth closed.

His father doesn’t swallow at first. Even in the delirium of fever, he is set against swallowing the pills, and his eyes shoot daggers at Dongwoo. Dongwoo, though, holds his mouth closed until he swallows.

But now Dongwoo lies on the hospital bed, crying silently because he doesn’t have the breath left to make a sound. He is no longer the protagonist of this story, or the hero that stands triumphantly over the darkness. No, now he is his father, the passive patient.

            So Dongwoo lets his thumb slip a little further, and the black button slides down in its socket. He feels the slight pinch in his arm as the fluid courses into his veins. In a couple more seconds, a deadening sensation spreads through his body. His muscles relax and the thrashing pain in his gut is calmed to a quiet grumble. It’s as if his insides have been wrapped in a warm, heavy blanket. Dongwoo feels the sensation crawl up to his face, feeling the warm blanket pull itself over his eyelids and persuade them downwards.

            Right before he falls asleep, Dongwoo suddenly wonders if the thing from his nightmare will come back again as he sleeps. By the time he thinks of that, though, it’s already too late, and a split second later he’s out cold.