"In your eyes,

I know it hurts to smile but you try to,

Oh, you try to."

How deep does the deception go?

She’s sat there a long time before she says anything. Yeri is on the phone, her best professional voice closing out a sale. Seulgi studies the room. The potted plant, Sooyoung’s clearglass office wall, Sooyoung herself behind the desk. People coming and going. The clock where it was. The watercooler, the little paper cups. If things are different here then things might not be real. It might be a dream within a dream. The deception could be so deep that even Seulgi cannot parse between the corporeal and the fleeting. She turns her chair a slight so that she’s almost facing Yeri. The cut on her finger has faded a slight since the morning.

‘Okay. Yep, thank you very much. I’ll get right on that for you. Thank you for your time this afternoon. Thank you. Okay, bye now. Bye.’

When she’s done she thumbs the button on the centre console and leans back and looks at Seulgi. ‘What?’ she says.

Seulgi is silent. The world without is much louder, more immediate. Eventually she says, ‘Did I cut myself?’

‘What?’

‘At work. Did I cut myself on something? A pair of scissors, or a knife. Maybe a papercut or something while putting away a bunch of documents.’

‘What are you talking about?’

At this Seulgi can only shrug meekly and hold up her finger. ‘I cut myself,’ she says. ‘But I don’t remember how I did it. Or where it came from. I don’t even remember it bleeding or hurting. I thought maybe I’d cut myself on something at work. Or maybe making breakfast.’

‘I dunno. You never mentioned it. Or maybe you did and I forgot. Would be like me.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You hungry? I’m gonna grab some lunch.’

‘It’s four in the afternoon.’

‘Then I’ll call it a snack.’

‘Get me something chocolatey,’ Seulgi says. Yeri pushes her chair back and wanders off down the hall to the breakroom. Seulgi watches her go. She is the same – that much is for sure. The building is too. The interior is as it was in her world of imagination, all cold concrete and glass. Standing there on the sidewalk and looking up she realised then and there that the difference between her work when asleep and her work awake was nothing at all.

It isn’t until Yeri comes back a couple minutes later and tosses her a bar of chocolate does she begin to think on it again. There are so many questions and no way to ask them and nobody to ask them to. How much of the breathing world is real? All of it? None of it? Is this the breathing world at all or another apparition? And if she wills Yeri and the others to just disappear will they do so? Perhaps. Red bedsheets, red curtains. But they were blue when she woke up and she knows blue is real – blue is tangible. She can tie blue to the world as she knows it, just like the dice. But then what about the cut? She glances at it again. Still there. There’s no more physical pain, only the lingering sentiment that something is very wrong and she doesn’t quite know what.

‘You okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Seulgi says without looking up. It takes her a moment to process it’s Sooyoung and not Yeri, leaning an arm over the top of her cubicle, worried expression on her face. ‘Oh, ,’ Seulgi mumbles. ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. Is anything wrong? You look a bit distracted.’

‘No, I’m good. I just cut myself earlier and I don’t remember how I did it.’

‘What?’

She holds up her finger. ‘Think I must’ve caught it on a door or something. I don’t remember cutting it.’

‘You want a plaster for that?’

Seulgi looks at it again. There exists a certain superstition that urges her to leave it as it is. That to alter it in any way would be to remove something vitally important in the order of things. She says, with a polite shake of the head, ‘No, thanks. I’m good.’

‘How are you getting on?’

‘Good. I’m doing good.’

Sooyoung glances at Yeri, sat enjoying a sandwich and wheeling her chair about. ‘You get on with it,’ she says.’

‘Yes ma’am.’

‘You still on for dinner later?’

‘Sure thing.’

Sooyoung smiles and looks at Seulgi and taps the side of the cubicle wall again. ‘See you around,’ she says. Seulgi watches her walk off to her office. When she’s out of earshot she turns to Yeri and says, ‘What was that about?’

‘What?’

‘Going for dinner with your boss?’

‘In a platonic way. What’s wrong with being friends with your boss?’

‘Nothing. It’s just, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Never been friends with my bosses before.’

‘Sooyoung’s cool like that.’

‘Guess so.’

‘You wanna come too?’

Seulgi thinks about it only for a moment. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m busy tonight.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t sweat it. I’m here all day.’

‘What?’

‘Dunno,’ Yeri says with a shrug. ‘Thought it sounded cool.’

She notices things less.

It may be the slipping of her sanity or it may be how much of her concentration is swallowed up by Irene when they’re together or something else entirely but Seulgi begins to notice things less. Some things linger – when she wakes up with thoughts of Irene swimming in her head the curtains are still red and when she wakes in the dark just before dawn to blue bedsheets and blue curtains with nothing but muddy memories of a time never existed she knows it’s real. The dice, too. But other things go unnoticed, such that no longer does she even know if the lights are that bit brighter or the numberplates on the cars along the avenues are back to front or signs are in languages they shouldn’t be in. She ignores it entirely.

It’s a week, or two, or two months. Time moves differently. She knows Irene very well, every part of her, intimate and otherwise. There are things Irene has yet to tell her and Seulgi understands this written on her pale and beautiful face because Seulgi knows it all too well – the need to hide things. To keep temporary secrets. It isn’t a desire to hide them, it’s a desire to not tell them. Irene gives her smiles and momentary happiness. Irene is real because when she looks at Seulgi across the table or in the bedroom Seulgi’s heart knots and her stomach does flips and what else could ever be more real than that?

‘You’re getting good at this,’ Irene says. Seulgi stands at the head of the bowling lane and turns back to her and gives a wry little smile, bowlingball in hand, ready to throw. The scores read 46 Irene, 44 Seulgi. She pivots and lines it up and gives the bowl of her life. It goes tumbling down with a crash in a smooth arc. The line remains smooth. She bowls a strike with a clatter of pins and a humming of false appluse from the scoreboard and a little cheer as she turns back to Irene again and says, ‘I think I am. Maybe I’m better than you.’

‘What, because you got a strike? I think you’re getting too big for your boots.’

‘Maybe I am.’

‘Watch this,’ Irene says. She grabs one of the bowlingballs and lines it up as Seulgi did and bowls a strike straight down the centre. Then in her next three consecutive attempts she proceeds to throw three more strikes. The scores read 86 Irene, 67 Seulgi. Irene leans against the machine that spits out their used balls, one hand on her hip, smirk playing on her delicate face. ‘Well,’ she says.

‘Alright. Did you have to do that?’

‘What? Embarrass you?’

‘Go all out.’

‘Yeah, I did. Had to make sure you understood who’s best. Seulgi. Seulgi.’

‘What?’

‘Who’s best?’

‘You,’ Seulgi says quietly, reluctantly.

‘You’re damn right I am. You want something to eat?’

‘No, I’m good. I could do with a drink, though. Maybe a banana milkshake or something.’

‘I tried earlier. They said the milkshake machine is all out of order. Won’t be working for a week.’

‘They said that?’

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘They told you it wouldn’t be working for a week?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing wrong with that. It’s just, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Why did they tell you in so much detail?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I want a milkshake.’

‘Well. Sorry. I’m gonna go grab something to eat anyway. I’ll be right back.’

‘Okay,’ Seulgi says with a smile. She makes sure to kiss Irene before she goes. As if she might never return. When she’s somewhere down the end of the alley Seulgi just sits there, content. She doesn’t dwell on what she knows to be true nor has she for quite some time. What is true in reality is not true to her. The truth as she sees it is this – Irene is real, she and Irene are real. And if that requires everything else to be non-existent then so be it.

A few minutes later Irene comes back. She’s holding two tall iced glasses with yellow bubbling in them and the look on her face is part perplexed and part amused.

‘What?’ Seulgi says.

‘That’s so weird.’

‘What?’

‘They said they’ve got it working now.’

‘The milkshake machine?’

‘Yeah. They said it just started working again.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t actually broken.’

‘I dunno. Anyway, who cares? Cheers.’

‘Cheers,’ says Seulgi, smiling again. When they leave the bowling alley – Irene with three victories, Seulgi with none – she’s still smiling.

It’s sometime later she makes the decision and finalises it. She doesn’t even know if it will work. There is nothing to suggest it either will or won’t and Seulgi balances precariously between hope and dread at the prospect of it. Perhaps the fact the idea has only just come to her is evidence enough of it being poorly thought out. But she maintains that she will try it anyway. What else can she lose? What has not already been lost? Has Irene? Long and painful musings – in this world and the real one – have revealed the answer to that: No. How to lose something which was never had in the first place?

The afternoon lies gloomy and metallic. Swathes of distant clouds pass on by like drifting archipelagos and the sun like melting steel is lost behind these gauze islands and it’s the most miserable of Fridays in a long time. Irene lies there on the couch watching TV when Seulgi walks in. She turns a slight to see Seulgi there in the doorway with her bag, catching her breath, redfaced and hair all messy with the wind.

‘Cold out?’ Irene says.

‘Yeah. Looks like it going to rain.’

‘You want something to eat? I made dinner.’

‘Later,’ Seulgi says. Irene pulls herself up off the couch and walks on over and pulls Seulgi in for a kiss. It’s full of love and adoration and a gentle domesticity that Seulgi hasn’t felt properly in a very long time. If ever. It reminds her that there is such a thing as real love and Irene is that such thing and nothing else can ever compare. Nothing can take that away from her either. Irene pulls away and cups her face and asks, ‘How was work?’

‘Good,’ Seulgi says. It is a lie in the most esoteric of senses. Work here still does not quite fully exist. She has understandings of work as it pertains to her – vague memories of being sat behind her desk cold calling with Yeri beside her. But nothing is concrete. Her life here remains like a chalk outline of a life past lived, like a series of cave drawings etched into some blank and weatherworn slate. Her dreams usually begin on the weekends, and when her dreams begin on any other day of the week it is always now, having come in from work, or on the bus home, or at some other point of the night. Occasionally she sleeps in the real world and wakes in Irene’s arms. Often it is in her own bed, the curtains a deep shade of red, the bedsheets the same. But never during the day. As if there exists some partition here to close her out from that forever.

‘Good?’ Irene asks.

Seulgi nods and forces a smile. ‘I’m going to go freshen up,’ she says.

‘Okay.’

When Seulgi is by the bathroom Irene calls to her. ‘I should really give you your own key,’ she says.

‘For this place?’

‘Yeah. You’re here more than you’re at your own nowadays, really.’

‘Guess you’re right. I didn’t really think about it all that much.’

‘I’ll get it sorted in the next couple weeks.’

‘Okay,’ says Seulgi. When she’s in the bathroom with the door closed she takes a moment to look in the mirror. What looks back might not be her at all. Long ago has she stopped believing whatever lies in front of her. It’s here, in a quiet moment of reflection, that she comes to a startling realisation – the existence of Irene is unchanging, firm, unable to be altered by Seulgi’s whims. There are things about Irene that Seulgi likes a slight less than the rest of her. The way she taps her fingers on any surface she can find and isn't even aware of it. The way she always leaves the towels in the bathroom hanging over the towel holder and not drawn out to dry properly. How she always takes so long to order food. Other things. But none of it can be changed. The world still has its flexibility – there are other aspects that can be moved or altered at just a thought – but Irene is not part of it.

She exists as the lodestone, the waypoint – a carefully placed interlocutrix at the junction between worlds. What can be wished away subconsciously or otherwise in the realm of the dreaming cannot be replicated with Irene. She simply is as she is. She cannot be changed or removed or otherwise tampered with. Seulgi’s perfectly imperfect muse, hobbies and work and mounting insecurities and all. That she was fathomed from Seulgi in the first place and is no real person of her own free will and device is a fact becoming less and less factual by the day. And days here are just as uncertain, just as easily manipulated. Time is warped to Seulgi’s subconscious liking. Should one day be too short then it might become three, or five. Curtains change, people cease to be, Wheein and others are formed at will. How long has she known Irene? Logic dictates a few weeks. Instinct says months. Seulgi goes with her instinct.

It’s here in the bathroom she resolves to put her plan into motion. The decision has not come lightly. She counts out her breaths to ten and back and puts on her best smile and goes back out and says to Irene, ‘Do you have a piece of paper? And a pen? Or just anything to write on, really.’

‘Yeah. In my bedside drawer. Second one down. Why?’

‘Just had a thought and I want to remember it for later,’ Seulgi says, and it isn’t quite a lie either. She dips into the bedroom. Her heart is already racing. In the second drawer down there’s a pad of lined A5 paper and a packet of old ballpoint pens and Seulgi takes one and tears off a page of the paper and sets it down on top of the table. For a moment she just stands there, hunched over the low table like some inveterate author of scripture at work. Then she begins to write. She writes Irene’s full name and her date of birth and her current address. She writes that Irene has one sister that lives away with their parents. That Irene works in Operational Security for a cyber security firm. That her favourite colour is purple. That her favourite hobbies are the performing arts and she performs with a drama troupe that put on modern versions of old Shakespearean plays in a theatre room in Sincheon. That she strongly dislikes mustard and the smell of onions and likes banana milkshake as much as Seulgi does. That she has many fears – spiders, snakes, heights. But most of all she is scared of something that terrifies her so much she rarely ever talks about it – she is scared of being forgotten. Of one day waking up in the knowledge that nobody is aware of your existence. That in the hearts and the minds of others, you have never existed at all. You never even were. And if you never were to others, would you stop being so in the present? Would you cease to be? What is life if nobody is around to ever hold it as a memory? Or you.

When Seulgi is finished writing she puts the pen back in the drawer and folds the piece of paper in her pocket. She checks it again. As if the laws of this world might have in some way changed it but it is still there. It takes a lot of effort to appear normal when she goes back through to find Irene still sat lounging about on the couch. Irene smiles at her. ‘You find it?’ she asks.

‘Yeah. Thanks. I think I’m going to sleep at mine tonight. Got to be up early for work in the morning and I’ve got some illustration stuff I’m working on still.’

‘Yeah? You didn’t tell me about it.’

‘Did I not? I thought I did the other day. I could’ve sworn I did.’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Oh,’ Seulgi says. She smiles again. It’s a proper smile because Seulgi is good at lying. The false mask of human happiness is one that fits her very nicely. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she says.

‘Are you going already?’

‘Yeah. If I don’t, I won’t get it done. And it’s got a deadline.’

‘Okay,’ Irene says, entirely understanding. She pulls herself off the couch and draws Seulgi in for a kiss and Seulgi kisses her back. Her heart runs like caged electric. Here she stands on the precipice of some monumental ordeal and Irene doesn’t even know it yet. Seulgi thinking: Please let it work. Oh, please.

She walks home alone in the dark, going like a dreamer. In her pocket are the dice and the piece of paper neatly folded three times. She steps into her apartment and changes out of her clothes and her heart is still running madly and she can hear the bloodbeat of it pulsing in her eyes and she lies down on the bed and holds the scrap of paper tight in her hand and closes her eyes. The woes of insomnia befall her. She lies for a long time in the cold dark emptiness of her room where Irene should be and she tries best she can to remove all thoughts from her mind but it’s a task she isn’t quite capable of. She glances around one final time. Everything feels curiously unlived. The red of her sheets, the curtains. Everything else. Then she lies back down and closes her eyes and finally like a bitter elixir sleep comes.

The same place.

She opens her eyes to a narrow line of daylight pouring in through the purple curtains and she has a mild headache and outside there are birds warbling. The scrap of paper is still in her hand. Slowly Seulgi pushes back the sheets and sits up against the headboard and reads her note to herself. It’s a list of things she already knows, all of them about Irene, and the feeling in the pit of her stomach is so alien she is almost sick. As if so many weeks of trying in vain to desperately remember Irene’s face or name or anything about her have never existed at all. Have never had reason for it. Irene has always been there – the object of her dreams, but there. And the question repeats itself, a mantra of sorts, an assurance of her rapidly loosening grip on sanity – if this happiness is real, what part of it is not? Her imagination is a needed respite from the real world. And if this respite is more desirable than the alternative, who is to say it isn’t or cannot be real? Who has that power?

So sits Seulgi. A lonely god, sovereign in her warped domain. The sheets are purple to match the curtains - did she change them last week? Was it the week before? Was it after she cut herself? The songbirds call away in the pale morning light. Her phone holds two unread messages from Seungwan and one from Yeri. She remembers Irene in every excruciating detail, the lines of her face and her toothy laugh and her favourite mustard sweater and her particular love of orange soda and the mole on the inside of her right thigh and everything else down to the most minute and passing of idiosyncrasies. All that remains in doubt is whether she exists at all. Is this some other world of dreams, in which both Seungwan and Yeri now exist? Is this the real world? Has Irene existed all along?

Seulgi’s heart murmurs unhealthily. She feels as if at any moment she might die. Her hands are cold and red and shaking as she holds up the piece of paper and reads the address. She reads it again. The location is already known to her but she reads it anyway, as if for reassurance. Real or unreal, loved always. And without another thought Seulgi determines to make a reality out of her dreams for good.