"We're in Hell,

It's disguised as a paradise with flashing lights,

I just wanna believe there's so much more."

She remembers the night leading up to it. Drawing under the shade of the window, a knife of pale moonlight, sitting with Seungwan on the couch and eating takeout, sleeping alone. But what came after is a blur. She lies on the bed with her hands on her stomach watching the dark of the ceiling and nothing comes to her. A great part of her likes to believe it was a dream and nothing more but what is the truth and what is not and does this lie somewhere in between? The elusiveness of this is both frustrating and intriguing.

Slowly it all comes back. The blinding lights, the painted neon, the soft glow of it as she walked past. There were cherryblossoms turning and falling in the middle of the street and they were white all the way up until they were in her hand and then they were pink and then they were gone. Seulgi remembers almost all of it. What eludes her is the woman in the queue. Only the shape of her. A drawing. Caricature. She lies there in the dark for a long time. There are no cars outside and the echo is absent and she tries hard as she can to remember anything about the woman in her dreams and she can’t at all. No voice and no face and no name. As shapeless as most everything else.

Seulgi just sits there with her legs folded. The cold of it all. The morning coming. Soon she lies back down and tries to sleep and after a while does sleep and there are no dreams vivid or otherwise any longer. Just the darkness.

It’s hard to talk to Seungwan about it. In truth it’s hard to talk to anyone about anything but Seungwan would be willing to listen to whatever, and yet there are some things even she wouldn’t be able to understand or comprehend. Seulgi thinks perhaps this is one of them. It takes her half the day to muster up the energy to get out of bed. By six PM she’s by the window again, doodling into her canvas book idly, a lonely prisoner in her chickencoop. Her phone never rings, nobody ever texts. Cars go past and keep her a sort of strangely pitiful company. And she never cries. Just sits there and draws. Sometimes there is work to distract her from the loneliness and sometimes there isn’t and this is the latter.

It’s almost nine when she gets a text from Seungwan asking if she’s okay. Seulgi just sits there with the phone in her hand. Then she swipes up and types Yeah and sends it and is done. By ten she’s finished with the drawings. By eleven she’s in bed. There’s a hesitance to her, lying there with the bedside light still aglare wondering if sleeping is the correct thing to do or not. Instead she goes and grabs the book from in the kitchen and sits reading it with no real concentration at all. Solitude has never come easy to her. The problem with this lies in how often solitude is all she has. Escape from the outside world is not much of an escape at all.

She finished another chapter and dogears the corner and sets it beside her phone on the bedside table. Then she turns out the light and just lies there. Nothing comes to her. Just the silence. After a while she settles in and closes her eyes and drifts slowly to sleep.

Lights.

It’s the lights that clue her into the strangeness of it. There’s a sentience to them that unnerves her as much as it entrances her. She’s standing on the sidewalk at an intersection in central Seoul and it’s a bright day, a pale sun nestled into small gauze archipelagos of cloud that drift about the sky like moving islands and vanish behind the buildings and some reappear again out the other side and others do not. It might be morning, might be four PM. Seulgi thinks perhaps it does not matter at all.

Behind her is a coffeeshop and two doors down another café. The lights inside are so bright she has to wince a slight to peer inside at all. When she waves her hand about in front of her face the lights move with her, a soft hue falling about her fingers when she bends them and straightens them out again. All the lights are as bright and as immediate – the cars behind her, the soft blue glare of a cellphone screen half a mile down the avenue, the white of the sun. She puts her hand in her jacket pocket and pulls out her phone and it’s this that tells her she isn’t in the real world, only some crudely bastardized form of it.

Whatever is real is not here. Seulgi closes her eyes and counts to ten and opens them again. The lights still there. People sat in the café minding their own business, paperchain people, figures from a book not quite finished. She puts one foot forward on the sidewalk and the whole world ripples under her weight and flattens out again and she has to look down and look about and wonder if anything truly happened at all. Stuck at the avenue trafficlights just up the street the license plate of one of the cars reads 9999999. Slowly they change. Red to amber to green, the boldest green she’s ever seen. The cars drift off. It smells of coffee and engine oil and the daycold. Someone’s coughing. Everything is moving just that little bit out of place and time, like a grainy film of daguerreotypes, or something she shouldn’t really be observing.

After a while Seulgi turns around and opens the door of the coffeeshop and goes on in. The woman behind the counter is short and smiley and has chestnut brown hair and a mousylooking nose and Seulgi orders a black coffee and the moment she turns around to look about the shop she can’t remember what the server looked like at all.

‘Ma’am?’

Seulgi turns back to her. The coffee is in a cup on a neat little saucer with a stirrer, just for good measure. The woman behind the counter says, ‘That’s five thousand won, please.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’

Seulgi puts her hand in her pocket and searches around. The only thing there is a single crumpled five thousand won note. She hands it over and the woman behind the counter smiles and takes it and rings it up and says thank you and Seulgi says thank you back. For a moment she just stands there. As if to proceed in any manner at all will disrupt the order of things – the equilibrium has been momentarily disturbed. Standing there at the heart of the storm she feels her hands begin to tremble and her breath catch in . The woman behind the counter looks at her and looks to someone at the side of her and turns away again.

‘Seulgi?’

Seulgi turns to her right. There’s a woman there she recognises immediately and it’s terrifying how immediate her reaction is. Dark-haired, short, beautiful. ‘Irene?’ she says.

Irene smiles warmly at her. ‘Kang Seulgi, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We met the other night at—’

Seulgi blinks, and all the world’s sound is into the momentary darkness. It’s short enough to feel like nothing at all but she has no idea what Irene said. Ending only in, ‘You remember?’

‘Yeah. Of course I remember. I asked for a cigarette.’

‘Yeah,’ Irene says. She runs a hand through her hair and looks about and says. ‘Do you want to sit down together or something? Unless you’re busy. I don’t mind sitting on my own. If you don’t want to disturbed or something.’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘Cool. I’ll just order.’

Seulgi nods. She grabs her coffee and sits by the window and watches the world outside slowly distorting. Something is off. She looks back at Irene at the counter and smiles and Irene smiles back at her and Seulgi has to turn away again. Everything is off.

Irene sits opposite with a steaming coffee and a sandwich on a plate. ‘Fancy seeing you here,’ she says.

‘Yeah.’

‘What are you up to?’

It only takes Seulgi a second to reply. ‘I was just wandering around the neighbourhood,’ she says for no reason at all. ‘Figured I’d get some fresh air.’

‘Yeah? You cooped up inside or something?’

‘You could say that, yeah. What about you?’

‘I’m on my lunchbreak,’ Irene says.

‘Where do you work?’

‘At an IT place just around the corner from here. Mostly in cyber security solutions, stuff like that. Nothing all that interesting. Or at least, not to most people in the outside world. But it pays the bills.’ She looks at Seulgi and drops her head and laughs a slight, a nervous and reserved laugh that says very little at all. ‘Sorry,’ she mutters. ‘I doubt you care about all that.’

‘I don’t mind. Sounds cool.’

‘Well.’

‘Cooler than what I do.’

‘What do you do?’

Seulgi circles a finger around the rim of her cup. ‘I’m a freelance illustrator,’ she says.

‘What? Oh, so you do drawings and stuff?’

‘Yeah. And people pay me for it. Mainly fantasy authors and people like that. Sometimes I get commissions for video game artwork and stuff.’

‘And you think me working in IT security is cooler than that? Are you kidding me?’

‘Well,’ Seulgi says shyly, shrugging her shoulders.

‘It’s not. That’s one of the coolest jobs there is.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You get to make people’s worlds come to life on the paper. Or digitally, or whatever. Is it digitally?’

‘Most of it.’

‘Well, you get to make people’s worlds come to life either way. That’s one of the coolest things there is. It’s creativity as its purest, I think. At its best.’

‘I never thought of it like that.’

‘That’s just my opinion.’

Seulgi can only smile. She drinks and it’s the perfect taste and temperature. A moment later it occurs to her that Irene is the first stranger she’s talked to in as long as she can remember that doesn’t make her feel uncomfortable and the truth of this is not lost on her. For a while they just sit there. Then Irene says, ‘How’s the coffee?’

‘Coffee’s good. Maybe the best I’ve had in a long time.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, it’s pretty good either way.’

‘I’ve been coming here every day for the past six months,’ Irene says. ‘On my breaks, I mean. It’s a pretty good place. Pretty chill.’

‘The lights are quite bright.’

‘What?’

‘The lights. They’re pretty bright.’

Irene giggles. It’s a laugh Seulgi likes the sound of because it’s disarming. It puts her world at peace if only for a minute. The absurdity of it all. Locked away in the confines of her own mind, dreaming and dreaming. Reminding herself that none of this is real and none of it ever can be. But sitting with Irene part of her begins to think that perhaps it is real, perhaps it might just be. What else could be the answer? What could suffice? Irene shifts a slight and takes a bit of her sandwich and says idly, ‘I don’t think they’re that bright. Maybe you’ve got sensitive eyes or something?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

Seulgi drinks again. It’s only when they’ve been talking another ten minutes or so does she ask, ‘What time is it?’

Irene pulls out her phone and says, ‘Just gone half one. I’ve got to be back by quarter past two. So I’ve got time. Unless you’ve got to be somewhere in a hurry.’

‘No, I’m okay. I was just wondering.’

Irene smiles at her again. It’s a smile Seulgi thinks she could get used to – the curving of her lips, the pleasantness of it, so polite and calming. She sits there and she begins to think, perhaps dangerously: I wish I could sit and talk like this all day. I wish she didn’t have to go back to work.

‘What are you doing tonight?’ Irene asks.

‘Not a whole lot. Just, you know…working. Well, kind of.’

‘Do you want to go for a meal or something? I mean, you don’t have to. God, that sounds so weird of me. Sorry.’

‘It doesn’t sound weird.’

‘I sound like I’m being really forward or something. I promise I don’t just go around asking random people to dinner with me over nothing.’

Seulgi only smiles. It’s all she can do. She says, ‘Yeah. I’d like dinner.’

‘Okay, great. Anything in particular you want? Or do you want me to pick? Or are you not that bothered?’

‘I’m not that bothered.’

‘Okay, cool. Well—’ she stops, acutely aware she’s been interrupted by her phone. She takes it out of her pocket and reads it a couple times with a pout and a frown and puts it away again.

‘What?’ Seulgi says.

Irene glances at her and shrugs. ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘I’ve just been told I’ve got the rest of the day off.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. Weird, right? My boss just texted me to tell me he doesn’t need me to come in for the afternoon, so I can go home. Said to come back tomorrow.’

Seulgi is quiet.

‘I mean, I’m not complaining or anything. But yeah. Weird. Oh, well. Guess that means I’m free for the rest of the afternoon.’

‘Me too.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ Seulgi says, unaware if it’s true or not. Perhaps there exists in this world without the world some other job for her, or something to do. Some other person to see. It would be easy to take out her phone and check her contacts and see for herself but something pushes her to inaction. To just sit there and smile and push her hair out of her face and try not to blush and wonder in a moment of quiet reflection why she feels none of the usual nerves, the aching terror, the wavering of her wayward heart.

‘Do you want to go somewhere or something?’ Irene asks. ‘Or just sit here? I don’t mind.’

‘I don’t mind either,’ says Seulgi. She thinks about it for a moment. Thinks: Maybe I should go home. Something isn’t right.

Then Irene says: ‘Or not, if you feel awkward about it or anything. If, like, you want to go home or something. I don’t mind. Maybe I’m being a bit weird, you know? Sorry.’

‘No, you’re not. You’re not. I don’t mind.’

Irene looks almost ready to leave. It takes very little convincing at all for Seulgi to shift a slight and smile and say, ‘We could go for a walk or something. I don’t mind where.’

‘Sure.’

It’s twenty minutes later, walking aimlessly through central Seoul, that either of them speaks again. Irene says softly, ‘I still can’t figure out why my boss would text me out of the blue like that. He didn’t even ask me to come back to the office first. Just said I could take the afternoon off. Weird, huh?’

‘I guess. Does it not happen often, then?’

‘Practically never, barring emergencies and stuff. But whatever.’

‘When did you get into IT security? Or have you always wanted to do it?’

‘Kind of,’ Irene says. ‘I mean, I’ve always been into IT, believe it or not. I know I maybe don’t look like it, but it’s true. And IT OpSec was just another facet of that, I guess. Like a natural progression.’

‘OpSec?’

‘Operation Security.’

‘Oh,’ Seulgi says. ‘Right.’

‘What about you? Always wanted to draw? Or illustrate. Sorry about the terminology.’

Seulgi giggles at that. There’s a comfortability with Irene she hasn’t felt in a long time and under any other circumstance it would be disconcerting. She stuffs her hands into the pockets of her jacket and shrugs and says, ‘Yeah. Kinda. I went to uni for an undergrad degree in Illustration, which was pretty much the perfect thing for me at the time. So, yeah, it’s always been my sort of thing.’

‘Love what you do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.’

Seulgi stops and looks at her. ‘Yeah,’ she says slowly. ‘How did you—’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah. Sorry. Had a weird little moment there.’

‘Do you want to go sit down somewhere for a while? Or just hang out?’

‘Sure,’ Seulgi says. Minutes later the realisation hits her that she’s only known this woman for hours and has only met her twice and it feels like lifetimes. There’s something about her so intoxicating it’s almost physically painful – the soft jasmine and sandalwood scent of her perfume growing and receding, the sculpt of her high cheekbones, how cute her ears look in contrast to her pinnedback hair, the elegance she goes about everything. It’s almost maddening. And perhaps there’s a dim aura around her as she walks or perhaps it’s Seulgi’s imagination but it doesn’t matter because none of it’s real, not even for a moment, not one bit of it.

‘It feels real,’ she murmurs.

‘What?’

Seulgi glances up at her again. The look on her face is part confusion and part amusement and it’s just as attractive as ever and maybe a little too much. ‘Nothing,’ Seulgi says. ‘Sorry. What were you saying?’

‘I was just talking about how boring it’s been lately.’

‘Yeah. Right. Sorry.’

‘I think I’ve seen a grand total of three people outside of work hours, for about an hour total. How’s that for a social life?’

‘I’m not much better,’ says Seulgi, and is it true? Does this world operate in the same delicate space as the corporeal world? Is the ruleset the same? Or has this too altered, like the lights and the coffee and the endless coincidences? Maybe there’s no need to encourage the truth. But the line between madness and imagination is very fine indeed and the boundaries of dream and nightmare finer still.

Irene stops walking. They’re standing at a different intersection. The clouds have dispersed, the sky is even clearer. It hurts to look at it. Things are just that bit different. Gasoline smells sweeter, the wind blows the wrong way, the lights are brighter. What is red perhaps should not be. Seulgi just looks at her. The knots of her carefully spun emotional yarn are slowly becoming unspooled. She says quietly, with a great deal of hesitance, ‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Yeah. Of course.’

‘Are you real?’

Irene laughs. It’s different to her giggles from earlier – an indication the question has caught her off guard. ‘What?’ she says.

‘Are you real.’

‘Are you okay?’ she says, still amused. But Seulgi isn’t laughing. She just stands there. Thinking: You’re not real, are you? You’re not.

‘Seulgi?’

It takes her a long time to respond. ‘Sorry,’ she mutters. ‘I don’t know why I said that.’

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Maybe I’m just hungry. Need something to eat.’

Irene’s face lights up again. ‘Now that,’ she says, ‘sounds like—’

Remember.

But she wakes in the silent cold like something back from the dead and she can remember the lights and the wind and the pale white sun and the woman that served her at a coffeshop somewhere in central Seoul but she can’t remember the woman she had coffee with.

No name, no face. All that comes to her after a great deal of effort is an outline, a paper cutout of a person. Nothing real at all. She lies back on the pillow and closes her eyes and takes a deep breath and tries to sleep, but no sleep comes to her for even a moment, and in the soft pink glow of the morning she’s still there, still awake, still searching for something that cannot be found.