The heavy hinged door opened up to an empty white-tiled hall. On the other end was another door, OPERATING ROOM. They have reached the OR entrance when he heard familiar voices behind them.

“Doctor, will he be alright?” A woman sobbed. It was his mother.

“If you mean about the procedure…” the male doctor’s voice trailed. “But it’s no guarantee…”

“Doctor, you must understand…” another man, his father, has pushed himself forward and between his mother and the doctor.

The doctor nodded and held his parents’ hands. “I am confident that your son will live after the surgery. But his vocal chords may suffer…”

Mary suddenly appeared in front of him. Her eyes reflecting the river of bleakness that was his face.

“Kyuhyun-ssi, we need to go,” she called. Her cold hands pulled him away from his parents and through the closed OR doors.

Briefly disoriented, he took in his surroundings and saw another long hallway littered with people wearing the same gray uniform, heads covered in medical caps, donning masks, and the same white pair of crocs. The hallway was lined with glass-walled rooms filled with similarly clothed people huddling over something which Kyuhyun later realized were human bodies undergoing surgery.

Is this how easy it is to detach yourself from one’s body? he thought, scanning the rooms. Why does he feel unaffected by his separation from his own body?

“Right here,” Mary pulled him towards the first room on his left, walking straight right through whoever passes by them, unseen.

Mary did not waste any time. She stood next to the doctor nearest to the body’s head, his body’s, head, that is. He shook his own head momentarily realizing the detached tone he just associated with his own body.

But Mary did not miss his reaction. “What do you mean no?” she huffed at him as she walked back by the door. “Oh, don’t be scared.”

Was he scared? he asked himself, then remembered his earlier encounter with that black thing whatever in the expressway. He was scared then. But now scared isn’t what he is feeling.

“It just doesn’t feel right,” he murmured instead to Mary who was looking up to him from his side.

“You are weirdly brooding for a dead KPop idol,” Mary mused, smiling; then she raised one finger. “Yet, I feel the same way too.”

“Are those in the ethers ever supposed to feel this way?” he asked.

Mary shook her head. “Only those who aren’t supposed to be in the ethers feels.”

Kyuhyun nodded back solemnly.

“Um, what you need to do is just lie down on the operating table, right where your body is,” Mary instructed, then beamed: “It was nice meeting you, Kyuhyun oppa. Despite the circumstances.”

“So, this is it?” Kyuhyun took a glanc