The boy with the razor wasn’t actually the first person who had asked Kyuhyun for death. During his childhood, his father had more than frequently asked Kyuhyun to shoot him or strangle him. It wasn’t just his father; all sorts of people came to Kyuhyun for death—his proctor, his neighbor, his sister. They probably figured that a kid without emotions couldn’t be emotionally traumatized. They were right; Kyuhyun wasn’t traumatized; he’s only refrained because the benefits of doing dead men favors never outweighed the detriments.

Similarly, Kyuhyun didn’t take that razor and slice off the boy’s hands not because he didn’t want to, but because he hadn’t noticed any great advantage from doing so before two figures in green whisked the kid away.

Kyuhyun dropped the razor as soon as he saw the guards. He frothed in absurdity: two maniacs standing face to face, both expressionless, a razor between, and an army of green pulling in the curtains.

He’d been in this approximate position before, with his father. The old, ailing schizophrenic was ostracized from the world of numbers and stuck in an existence between padded white walls. He’d screamed a whole array of rainbow-colored, step-wise profanities amongst a series of tangled mathematical constructs as they dragged him off into the darkness. He’d sworn that he was sane. He was so sane, damn it! So sane!

But the kid was different. He didn’t utter a word as they hauled him away. He stared silently at Kyuhyun and the razor lying uselessly before Kyuhyun’s anti-hipster loafers, with glassy eyes and pursed lips. Old tears were still falling out of his eyes. It was kind of as if they were there simply to wash themselves away. Kyuhyun stared flatly at the way he faded deeper into the corridor. It amused him how they’d caught the wrong guy.

He considered speaking up: something like, “Hey, hey—the madman’s standing right here.” But he only considered. He was a predator, after all. Predators had no regard for anything. Not that he cared. As far as he was concerned, the suicidal boy was one that he would never see again, a technical glitch on the stage that wouldn’t happen again.

Kyuhyun his heels and made for the entrance.

Heechul's car was already parked by the gates, booming with Italian baritones. The old two-column proof found its spot in Kyuhyun’s consciousness again and the feeling, though nauseating, made him comfortable. He hated his world of dots and segments and lines and planes and axes, but he was uncomfortable outside of it. It was his shield. He might be a snail that had one hell of an ugly shell and knew it, but when worst came to worst, without the shell he was but a vulnerable, penetrable, spineless glob of slime weak to smiles and sunshine and fertilizers and bicycle tires and birds and little brats’ converse bottoms. If someone tried to embrace him without his shell, he’d die. A slimy, snotty, sickening death. No question about that.

“No question about that,” Heechul decided. The Italian Opera enthusiast (or anti-fan; Kyuhyun never figured out which it was) took a determined bite out of his carrot stick before planting his sunglasses on his face and igniting the BMW with a roar.

“About what?” 

“He doesn’t even listen to me! You know what your problem is, Cho Kyuhyun? You’re a ing stuck up mother er who thinks you’re better than every ing er out there. But you ain’t . You’re one ed up piece of and you need to get the out of my car and burn all of those biographies about you in the library because it’s making my trying to find anything at all about Joseph ing Stalin ing hell. And, mind you, I ing hate Stalin so every extra millisecond I have to spend with his name in my head makes me want to snap your neck just a little—”

“Sure,” Kyuhyun smiled.

He liked Heechul because Heechul was the only person on the planet who hated him without actually knowing who he really was. Heechul despised Kyuhyun’s character with all his guts; probably all of humanity’s discrimination, mass burials, and massacres added up together couldn’t amount to a third of Heechul’s extreme, gut-splitting, spit-wadding dislike of Cho Kyuhyun. The best part of it was that Kyuhyun couldn’t figure out why. Most people worshipped his genius, and if they didn’t, at least they didn’t want to snap his neck for it or wring Italian opera out of his eardrums. However, Heechul was an abnormality. He was a blackhole. A speck of fairy dust. The ultimate incongruity. A question left for all future Kyuhyunists.

Kyuhyun liked thinking that, by the time of his death—which could be any moment—he would leave at least one unsolved problem behind. Kim Heechul was a good sort of problem; absurd, opaque, depthless. In addition to Heechul, Kyuhyun also planned to leave behind his goldfish, a koi from Japan from one of his fans, floating belly-up in a beautiful aquarium. It would be a great open-ended ending to the theatre that was his life. People would swarm in, all sorts of self-informed Cho Kyuhyun experts, and try to determine the link between Kim Heechul and a koi from Japan. Chaos. Hilarity.

Heechul’s hand clamped onto his shoulder just as Kyuhyun fed one foot out the door. Another hand crept under his chin, turning it abruptly back so that Heechul could dig his eyes—glittering dully somewhere behind those oversized sunglasses—into the mathematician’s flat-lined stare.

 “And the proof?”

Kyuhyun chuckled, scrunched back into the car, and picked a permanent marker out of his pockets. He always carried one with him. He liked the scent of toluene and xylene and imagined that dying from a lifetime’s chronic poisoning by said chemicals would make an interesting chapter in one of those biographies which were driving Heechul and his Stalin rampage mad. He scribbled onto Heechul’s white leather seats and knew it annoyed the man to no ends. However, Heechul didn’t complain because he hated complaining about anything except Kyuhyun, and Kyuhyun appreciated that. He capped his marker with a final glance over the lines of incomprehensible cursive.

“Good?”

“You’re a ing and I hope you know that. Now get the out of my car.”

“See you in class.”

“ off. And thanks.”

Kyuhyun took off with a grin on his face. Heechul’s BMW roared into the distance and sent butterflies into Kyuhyun’s stomach.

Seeing Heechul had always made him giddy, not because Heechul was in any way supportive or friendly. Heechul was, technically, a douchebag thug who threatened Kyuhyun for proofs so he could sell them at unreasonable prices to stressed undergrads. He was a god-awful friend who never called himself a friend and insisted on calling Kyuhyun a variation of bastard or er or piece of goddamned at any and every opportunity. But Kyuhyun didn’t mind, because hating stage props would be silly.  

As Kyuhyun strolled down the sidewalk on his way home, sunlight grazing his cheeks and fall leaves raining, a small question about geometric group theory fluttered into his consciousness. He imagined placing it into his mouth so that his thoughts, an ant army swarming inside his skin, could crawl all over it until it was concealed in a layer of hideous, pulsating, blood-curdling blackness and began shrinking smaller and smaller. He could imagine those ants tearing off one tiny chunk of its flesh at a time and shredding these little chunks into tiny particles, atoms for digestion.

These ants, his thoughts, were good to him. They weren’t inconsiderate beings, for they’d never touched his face, never touched his skin. They understood that he couldn’t always tend to them because he had to consume meat and bread and water and greens to stay alive. They spared him his mask and let him have the semblance to a human being. But they reminded him constantly that he had no real soul, that he was just an empty skin filled up with their colonies and that if anyone perchance stabbed him, there would be no blood. There would simply be a thick river of ants flooding and scampering out of his body as he deflated.

The black storm consumed the problem in relatively little time and began meandering into 3-manifolds and hyperbolic geometry, pieces of stile carcasses scattered beside the pristine bones of good old geometric group theory.

To Kyuhyun, he was as animated as ever—maniac, in fact—but in reality he was frozen stiff in the middle of the busiest street in Princeton. Passerby stared and took note of him, of the great Cho Kyuhyun in yet another revolutionary epiphany. Some of them cooed, some awed, some snapped photos with their phones expecting some sort of response, but Kyuhyun couldn’t see them. What he couldn’t see, he couldn’t care for. 

The brunette stood in absolute silence, allowing his entire being to focus and visualize the demise and annihilation of those glorious corpses in his universe. What he saw wasn’t the quaint buildings or the autumn leaves or the crowds bunching up around him. What he saw was a cruel world, where things were born to be destroyed. He created trees and forests from acyclic models and pretty leaves of category theory; skyscrapers from the reflective surfaces of discrete optimization and the guidelines of concrete, no-bull algorithmic game theory; mines and ores and beautiful pits of black petroleum from combinatorial optimization… he built life and humanity. He built society, built fraternities and patriarchs and dictatorships and democracies from numbers and alphabets and pieces of graphing paper. And he built them for the single purpose of feeding his pet ants, for the joy of watching their revolting, disturbing dismantling of all questions beautiful and paradoxical.

Kyuhyun closed his eyes and inhaled. The street was loud and obnoxious and confusing, but in some ways it was also silent. Noises canceled one another; ambulances crossing out the wails of babies, laughter taking away from angry shouting, the squeaking of chalk against blackboards erasing thick shuffling of the newest fall-fashion rain-boots. When he opened his eyes again, he tried taking in all the faces shoving up against his. He tried to understand the look in those dozens of eyes and the humanity behind them.

He gave up.

This world, the one that his physical body was confined to, was an awfully chaotic place that could somehow always manage to explain itself and Kyuhyun found it venerable. It was something that he couldn’t achieve. He could unravel chaos, but he couldn’t create it. He couldn’t maintain it. He couldn’t accept it. And because he couldn’t accept chaos, he couldn’t accept himself. He couldn’t understand his body that would bleed blood instead of ants.

At that moment, with the breeze caressing his skin and the gentle sun kissing his hair, Kyuhyun kept wished that something would happen to him. Something physically, mentally damaging, so as to do away with the ants. Perhaps he could jump into an intersection or toss himself off the roof. He was tired of floating between sanity and insanity and direly wished for the end to his perpetual assignment and reassignment to roles and characters and personalities that he really never wanted to have. Mad genius? Non-conformist predator? He just wanted to be Cho Kyuhyun. Normal. Or at least without the ants. Without his genius. He wanted to find himself, the guy beneath the thousands of masks, if he existed.

But did he exist, under those thousands of masks? Who was Cho Kyuhyun? Who was he?

“Are you alright?”

It took Kyuhyun a few seconds to pry his thoughts off their newest bent and process the words. The mathematician peered up slowly, finally beginning to register shape of a neck, a jaw, lips, nose, red eyes.

It was the crying boy again, looking feebler than ever. The kid was shaking and flushed and out of breath. Up close, his hair was unkempt and there were large bags under his blood-shot eyes and his complexion was a pastel yellow, like jaundice. Kyuhyun decided to call him Red, for his red eyes.

Kyuhyun took a second answer. Red took a second to reach out and grab his wrist. Physical contact didn’t shock Kyuhyun, but the awkward, unexplained manner in which Red did so startled him. His heart sped up. He didn’t enjoy this feeling. Chaotic. Too chaotic.

“I’m fine.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Kyuhyun. Cho Kyuhyun.”

“I know, but who are you?”

“A predator?”

“So who are you?”

Red repeated his question. His voice was shrill, though not unpleasant—or perhaps Kyuhyun had been desensitized from all of that blasting of L'Orfeo from Heechul’s apartment at four in the morning. The grasp on his wrist was tightening and it was painful, to say the least. Kyuhyun looked down. Red’s fingers were turning bloodless and white and his knuckles were pink from the cold. Kyuhyun thought that he resembled his koi, with a wrist that seemed as if it would shatter into bits if he ever took a fall. Kyuhyun suddenly wanted to see Red fall. And shatter.

“Who am I?”

Kyuhyun peered up at the clouds. The question, from Red’s lips, sounded different. Fundamentally so. It was no longer overwhelming; suddenly clear, so incredibly clear. The army of ants stood back, pitchforks and guns and harpoons raised and erected, whispering amongst themselves for the newest plan of attack and realizing that there was none. This question wasn’t edible. It wasn’t destroyable.

It wasn’t even a question. Kyuhyun looked down at his arm again. The boy finally seemed to realize what he had been doing and hesitantly took his hand away, unveiling four thick ribbons of pink over Kyuhyun’s porcelain skin. His lips were parted so slightly, just like the fish. Just like how the koi from Japan would look when floating belly-up. Kyuhyun found a new show, a bloodier scheme. Destroy the koi. And Red.

“I’m whoever you want me to be.”

“Kuixian, then.”

¹Title alludes to The Fire Sermon (The Wasteland Part III) by T. S. Eliot.

²L'Orfeo is a early Baroque opera based on the Greek legend of Orpheus: his descent to Hades and his fruitless attempt to bring his dead bride Eurydice back to the living world.

³"Who are you?" refers to the first anonymous message in Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World.