I: γένεσις / awakening

 

There was a certain beauty in blood, freshly drawn, violently spilled. Howon thinks it’s the way the crimson gleams in the light, across the dark mahogany of the wooden panels. He’s reminded of crystals, afternoons spent in his mother’s tiny garden, the salt-scented Busan air in his nostrils. He’s on the ground, knees darkened with dirt, as he bends over — supine — as he watches an ant’s determination travel from grass blade to grass blade, relentless.

He crushes the ant, of course. He presses his thumb against, feels (rather than hear) the crunch of its fragile form obliterated under the weight. He imagines pretend blood — maybe it was red, or black; maybe purple or green — gushing out of its tiny body, screaming in agony. Ants don’t scream, he sadly thinks.

He pulls his thumb away, and sees the dead ant stuck to the skin. He runs to a nearby tree and wipes the corpse on it. Days later, it would fester under the tree’s sap.

Howon remembers the shining amber, crystalline and beautiful — like the rings his mother used to wear, he could almost imagine it was the tree’s own jewels, her precious orbs.

Blood, still warm, spilled; it looks like it. Howon surveys its beauty, and he dips his finger to the puddle. It is still warm, he remarks to himself. Strange, he didn’t expect it to be warm. The corpse before him had expired hours before, handiwork of his other half for sure. Nevertheless, Woohyun did have moments of piety for Howon’s quirks.

He examines the body, the pale skin awash with gold under the two-fifty afternoon sunlight. He is bare, patches of red across patches of white and he looks like patterned shirts. A smile comes upon Howon’s lips. It was probably Woohyun’s idea of irony.

“Eh, you’re still not done?” A new voice intrudes into his thoughts, and he looks up to the door, half-way open. Woohyun is leaning against the door jam, his clothes streaked in crimson. His hair is damp against his forehead, and his arms are crossed, a knife strapped to the belt around his waist. He looked so tempting like that, Howon surmises.

“I would have, had you woken me up this morning instead of letting me sleep in.” He says, honest to a fault. It was one of his qualities, his mother once told him. Woohyun sends him an apologetic smile — extremely shallow, just like how nothing was apologetic about Woohyun in the slightest — and the older man steps forward, boots muffled under the soaked rug. Red, red, red.

He feels arms wrap around his frame, and Howon leans back, hands bracing to rest behind him. He feels warm liquid, and he spies the red painting his tan skin a new shade of velvety saffron, or maybe it was vermillion? Yet vermillion was darker, a drop bit more of purple than the purer crimson. Crimson didn’t seem right, as it was too red to be dark. Perhaps, when blood congeals, it changes…

“You think too much, you know?” Woohyun mutters, his lips warm against Howon’s neck. He sits down behind him, the subtle soaking of his pants in the gorgeous redredredred echoing in Howon’s ears, in his mind like a reverberating gong.

Squilch.

Squilch.

Squilch.

He’s sure that’s not a word, perhaps not even a contrived thought — a little fitting, for the harmony it brings to the chaos of his mind. Woohyun’s lips are warm, they always are. He shuts his eyes, and he splays his legs and his foot pushes the body away. He glimpses through lidded eyes, sensations abuzz, warmth setting his blood afire and he almost pouts as the body crashes against the wall.

“Stop thinking so much,” Woohyun says, whispers, to his ear and Howon nods.

 

II:  ἔξοδος / a chanced thread of fate

 

He meets Woohyun in the fall, when the days turn cold, and the sun dims its golden flames to grey warmth. Howon is sitting on the back of a diner — by the side of the road, forgettable, unwanted, unmissed — a warm cup of coffee in between his hands, and his life’s worth in the duffle bag next to him. A pile of bills rest next to his wrist, and he takes in the worn material, the used paper, the tears and the cuts.

“Mind sharing?” A man asks, and Howon looks up to a raised brow, a grin and his fated other half. He’s nameless, for now, but Howon knows. Its instinct…or intuition, or divine providence, but he knows. He’s always known things, and Howon has learned to trust in the tightening of his gut, the beating of his heart and the sweating of his skin.

“You by yourself?” The man asks, leaning back, arms behind his head. Howon nods, eyes raking over his form. He takes in the sweat against his temple, his smile and his sharp eyes — there’s no kindness to them, they are hardened steel — and the fluctuations of his voice beckons for something inside Howon.

His other half is alive. More alive than the walking corpses of everyday life, more alive than the grey dimness of the other diner patrons, their lifeless words, their deadened eyes, their ignorant, apathetic lives. The man intrigues him, draws something primordial in him.

Night falls, and he’s locked in an embrace in the backseat of the man’s car. He says his name is Woohyun, and Howon labels him as such. The man’s kisses are warm, heated and ignites a deep longing in him. His skin is dewy under the lamplight, fogged by the car windows made opaque with time and use. His touch is like divine flames against his skin, and his tongue was a slithery tendril, drawing lust and lust from his mouth, his neck, his s.

But Howon gasps when he feels sharpness against his neck, and his eyes open as he meets the dulled shine of a steel knife pressed against the artery beating frantically in his neck.

Woohyun smirks at him, unapologetic, and digs the knife closer. “I don’t think I have to tell you what this is, kid.”

Howon shakes his head, and he feels the heady flush arousal throb in his veins, his gaze blurring in anticipation — an eager smile almost on his lips.

Woohyun is confused, the knife easing for a moment as the man looks confused at Howon’s almost fervent state, and he moves. He grabs the wrist and slams it against the seat, and his thumb presses against the muscle — unforgiving. Woohyun cries out in shock and Howon grabs the fallen knife as the man loses concentration.

He grabs the knife and he tackles Woohyun back, hitting the car door and the knife pressed against his neck now.

“H—huh, didn’t think you had the balls.” Woohyun grits out, still grinning that cheeky grin as he glares at Howon.

Howon simply smiles and presses the knife deeper, sees a line of red trickle down a slender neck.

“So, you gonna kill me now?”

His question remains unanswered as Howon closes the distance and the red, tastes tangy iron-laden fluid and trails his tongue up to the steel of the knife. Woohyun shivers, his hands still unmoving.

“You a freak?” He asks, a confused snicker out of his lips. Howon doesn’t answer, he’s in love with silence and he’s in love with the red of Woohyun’s blood.

 

III: Λευιτικόν / re: i am

 

Woohyun is a killer.

He’s a murderer, a criminal.

His hands are stained with the blood of innocents, lambslaughter and homicide. He relishes the feel of blood gushing down his hands, its warmth filling in the gaping hole inside him that screams for completion. When the life fades from his victims, when he sees the light die in their eyes and their heartbeats reduced to zero, it’s enough to keep the abyss for a moment, to stay the hand of the void that lies inside of him.

Howon understands this.

He knows, because he shares that same void inside him. How can he not know, when his other half mirrors its partner, when two sides of the same coin are but one and the same — a forged identity by twin souls, coalescing, complementing, consensing — and that same coin flows from the ardours of heaven and the raptures of hell?

They were pariahs, aliens to the niches of human society — they were poets of their own works, their own paths of salvation.

Howon is an artist, he likes to believe himself so. There was so much to learn, to understand in the throbbing of veins, the pulsing of arteries as wine-red squirts and bleeds, and he longs to remember their stories — the nuances of each life they take, the tiny and miniscule sonnets that detail each awakening, each resting, each birth and death.

Edmund Husserl calls it ‘noema’, his substitution for what composes thought, composes judgment, composes perception. Howon thinks it’s an apt word, although he is ignorant of its origin, but like all authors, there is bound to be a word they do not know of — simply a word that sums the expression of truth, unbiased and objective.

Howon searches for this, this noema, this truth. It sings to him in the red flows, sinewy and threadlike, like an outpouring of roots from an expired husk of human life. Alchemists sought the powers to turn lead into gold; doctors sought knowledge to reverse death to life and clergymen sought the grace to repel sinner from saint.

Howon searches only for truth — that’s all he asks. Yet, truth is finicky and playful, capricious and whimsical. Truth is truth by virtue of being untruthful, and maybe that’s why Howon likes Woohyun.

Woohyun searches for nothing, save that hollowness in his soul. Its emptiness is what calls him to live about another day, another hand poised to deliver a killing, one day more to rip asunder the fragile threads that bind life and death.

Pilgrims walk the lonely road of self-salvation, and Howon believes himself lucky to be a pilgrim of truth, guarded by an empty husk of a man, covered in the skin of a murderer.

They travel to the southern cities, see the rivers and the seas, and Howon hears the crickets at night, the cicadas in the morning and feels dewiness of the dawn’s tears. Woohyun is always with him, perhaps a step back, or a step before — always a remark waiting to be spoken, an observation in of itself lending Howon a background to his unsleeping thoughts.

It makes him wonder — in those times where his search for noema takes pause, and he simply settles for watching the sleeping form of his other half — if Woohyun is simply searching for that which fills his soul…or if he’s already found it.

 

IV: Ἀριθμοί / binary heaven

 

Howon awakens to early light. A blanket keeps him warm, and Woohyun’s scent ades his senses. He wants to burrow himself further into the fragrance, that sweet mixture of honey and blood and he feels his veins sing in repose, in that blinding understanding of belonging — this is what completion feels like, he supposes.

But time rarely stops for philosophers on the cusp of enlightenment, and the daylight soon becomes too warm for him to bear and Howon rises, the sheet falling off his bare skin, the traces of chill in the morning air leaving his s erect, protest.

The bedroom is empty, silent even save for the clicking of the wall-clocks and, if he dares to, the dulled noise of the traffic below.

Tic-toc, said the clock.

What are you waiting for, questioned the wrist watch.

Oh, time of course! laughed the old sundial.

Funny thing about time, Howon thinks, is that it is eternal as it is ephemeral, that for each second passes, it is by itself an eternity in progress. He straightens out the sheets, and he hums to himself as the blue linen flies in the air, imagines them to be brisk waves of seawater on a hot, sunny day.

Beyond the door, he hears cutlery and smells breakfast. Howon follows the scent, not bothering to cover his form. His feet steps over an upturned boot, and he almost trips on a bunched-up shirt but he regains balance, one hand holding the door jamb as he smiles to himself, tracing the lines that carve down Woohyun’s back.

He ambles to him, the cells of his form calling to their mate, beckoning for reunion. He wraps his arms around Woohyun’s waist, and his fingers settle on the hair of his navel, dipping low to caress his . It is soft, flaccid and the skin a tone darker than the rest of Woohyun’s body, and he cups it in his hand, scrotum and all, like weighing tomatoes for a bargain.

Woohyun chortles for a moment, leaning back only to drop a feathered kiss down Howon’s cheek and he returns to the frying pan before him.

“Aren’t you scared?” Howon asks.

“Of what?” Woohyun retorts, adding a strip of bacon to the bubbling oil.

Howon glances at the contents of the pan. “Bacon splatters.”

Woohyun laughs louder at this, laughs like he’s about to cry. Howon simply smiles, presses his lips down the juncture where his other half’s neck meets shoulder, and he settles with that.

“Of all the things you could ask about, it had to be bacon splatters.” Woohyun remarks, and Howon bites his neck at the same time squeezes Woohyun down below. The man stiffens, between pleasure and pain, and a second passes before he elbows Howon softly.

“You’re a dangerous man, Lee Howon.” He mutters, when Howon releases him from both bite and grasp, as he transfers the bacon to a plate. Howon meets his gaze when his other half turns, and he doesn’t bother repudiating the truth. “No more dangerous than you, Nam Woohyun.”

A smirk. “Bonnie and Clyde?”

Howon shakes his head, turning to sit down on the table, opposite Woohyun. His legs rest against Woohyun’s, and he idly traces his ankle with a toe. Before him, Woohyun spears one strip of bacon and stuffs it into his mouth. Howon takes a moment to stare at his partner’s oil-laden lips.

Woohyun gives him a lascivious smirk in return, an eyebrow raised in proposition.

“No,” Howon answers, taking up his fork. “Not Bonnie and Clyde.”

They were Dante and Virgil.

 

V: Δευτερονόμιον / work out your salvation; through fear and trembling

 

Absolutes were paradoxical.

Truth was a fallacy.

Perhaps knowledge no longer holds truth, but a false explanation to satisfy one’s curiousity. After all, if it is truth, then how can a human being understand truth in its entirety? Human beings are limited in their potential for greatness, simply because they are human. After all, if eternity is eternity, power is power, then how far is the extent of our imagination to understand that infinity?

Howon surmises that the thought can be confusing, pretentious even, and perhaps he is — he decides he could care less if he seems a little arrogant about it. Sometimes, his thoughts get the better of him more than his common sense.

Woohyun likes to poke fun of him about it, likes to deconstruct his ideas into banters and Howon has to smile at that. Woohyun lives the simple life of the executioner, of living death, and he slices apart the made-up columns of Howon’s pilgrimage for understanding.

“Maybe,” Woohyun says, sighing, over his glass. “you’re not meant to understand. Maybe, you’re meant to never understand and just maybe, you’re meant to accept that.”

“You should talk with mother, she would have loved you.” Howon answers, resting his chin on his palm, content to watch the diminutive expressions that composes Woohyun — the way he rolls his eyes, the stretch of his thin lips, the pin-like blood vessels aching to burst at the seams.

“Sadly, a conversation with the dead is a boring affair. I can only talk about me for so long, her skeleton might die a second death.” Howon covers his smile with his hand, fighting back a laugh at Woohyun’s words. He had an odd sense of humor, one Howon shares, and it takes a while to pry it out of him — but Woohyun is quite the charmer. He speaks and speaks, and you listen and listen and even though his knife is pressed against your neck, you’d all but be willing to deliver that final blow yourself.

That, he thinks, explains the red trail they leave in their wake; a string of empty bodies, screaming at them, cursing at them, yet their bodies arching for more, for the blade to go deeper.

“It would have been nice,” Howon says, quietly, in the cicada-filled evening. “for you to have met her.”

Woohyun pauses, and he simply returns the look Howon gives him. He has no sarcastic remark, no witty response. He simply lets his silence reply to the ghost Howon’s words had resurrected.

Their evening continues on in wordless conversation, and Howon etches the swaying of Woohyun’s hair in the wind, the sharpness of his nose and the set of his lips into his memory, branding them for permanence. The sun begins its descent, and the golden sky flickers away to the consoling warmth of the dark, inky black sky. Down below, the city lights shine and the manmade slumbering leviathan awakens.

He’s found it.

His noema.

His truth.

That lifelong pilgrimage he had set upon, he’s found it in the gaping abyss that rested inside his other half. Understanding dawns on him, and for the first time, everything else becomes as alive as Woohyun in his eyes.

The stars shine brighter, it rang with poetic trite, but maybe that’s what he is: a trite pretender, on his final crusade for a grail that has been with him all along.

“Do you like fireworks?” Woohyun asks, mischief in his eyes.

“I like fireworks.” Howon responds, taking the bait.

And in a great burst of red and yellow, rubble and steel groan in a massive explosion. Cries rip the silence asunder; the scent of smoke and blood escape to the air and all around, the clanging chimes of horror continues to echo. The hospital in front of their apartment is brought to its knees, and Howon turns and catches sight of a ripped hospital gown, swaying in the wind, dripping red with truth.

 

 

They were philosophers and pariahs, artists and arsonists, saints and sinners — they had cut a swath, bloody and reckless, through the whole that made humanity. They gave no pity, asked for none. They sought no sympathy, blessed none. They played a game of annihilation, swapping each step for one step closer to death.

They were both Nero and Judas, both God and the Devil — Barabbas and Jesus.

“Don’t pray for us,” Woohyun sings in thick-accented English, eyes closed to guard against the smoke spewing off the hospital remains. “we don’t need no modern Jesus.”

Howon agrees. The only faith they had was faith in themselves.