Hoya smacks the top of his alarm clock before its first beep is scarcely out. He immediately gets out of bed, seeming to fight his way out from beneath the covers. He didn’t sleep last night, not on purpose, but because he couldn’t. His eyes had resisted the heaviness in his eyelids, and his brain had been whirring so fast and loud that it had drowned out the noise of his hip-hop lullaby.

            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.

            Dongwoo suddenly grips Hoya’s upper arms tightly. Hoya twists away from me.

            “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 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.

            .

            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.