He heard a buzz go past his ears, and lifted his head in time to see a fly land on the library window, scaling the warm glass for a moment before returning to the air to weave through the bookcases. He followed it with his eyes, tracking its seemingly nonsensical journeys from a book spine to a pushcart to another window pane to a poster on a trivia night being held that Friday. It then landed on the desk a teenage girl was splitting with her boyfriend as they worked on a research project that was presumably not progressing much based on the amount of inane chatter they’d been torturing his ears with for the past hour.

“Oh my god, kill it,” the girl said immediately, upon spotting the fly. She dug through her purse for something to smack it with, rattling around what sounded like a thousand pieces of loose change and dozens of makeup bottles. “That thing has been driving me cah-razy!”

“I’ll get it, babe,” the guy said, lifting his hand without a care for all the fly guts that might end up on it if he succeeded.

“Don’t,” he, the observer of this scene, heard himself saying. The couple looked up at him. The fly flew off.

“What the fuh-ck?” the girl asked, glaring with the kind of indignity only a teenage girl could muster. “Do you have a pur-ra-buh-lem?” She had a magical way of adding more syllables to her words than were actually supposed to be there.

“It’s going to die soon, anyways,” he said.

“It’s been flying by us for, like, three hours! It’s annoying me, and if I have to hear it one more time, I will skah-reem.”

“You’ve only been here for one hour,” he said. “And both of you have been annoying me, but you don’t see me screaming or trying to kill you.”

“Yeah, like, OK, boomer!” the girl said, rolling her eyes.

Her boyfriend rose to his feet. “You picking a fight with us, ?”

“Pardon me,” a librarian cut in. “But if you don’t lower your voices, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

The girl grabbed her books and shoved them into her bag. “Fine. Whatever. We’re going. This li-bah-rare-ee  is fly infested, anyways.” With much rustling of their bags, the couple dramatically stomped off. The librarian pursed her lips. The observer yawned. Such theatrics for such commonplace drivel. It never failed to bore him.

He shut the book he’d been looking at and stood up to return it to the shelf. He glanced at the spines of the others nearby it. Greek & Roman Mythology, Buddhist Folklore, The Faiths of the Native American People, A Guide to Norse Paganism.

Nothing about Korea specifically. At least American libraries were reliable in that way: they knew the general public didn’t really care about certain countries, and only stocked books about the relevant information people actually wanted (how to speak the language in basic situations, travel guides on what to do there should they ever find Korea a more interesting or at least more exotic destination than Europe). He highly doubted most people in America knew a single historical fact about Korea from before the War.

And he was grateful for that. People sometimes held on too long to things in the past that should be forgotten. He didn’t hate anyone for their ignorance, or at least not that particular variety of ignorance. He needed people not to remember. He needed their forgetfulness.

He turned away from the books and walked back to the desk where he’d set his things. Before leaving, he glanced by the window. The fly was sitting on the sill, motionless. He came closer to it, leaning down to look at its body. It still didn’t move. He brushed it gently with his fingers. It was dead.

He exhaled, grabbing a tissue from his pocket. He shifted the fly’s lifeless body into it, and held it cupped in his hands as he gathered his things and left the building. Once outside, he set it down gently on the grass.

"Due to your unjustness, unjustness will become a part of the human world," he murmured. “And so it was, and so it is.”

He rose to his feet and walked on.

He knew it was time to leave America and go back to Korea. He wasn’t a rigorous time-keeper—time was always in a state of being either momentously important and completely meaningless to him—but he could almost feel it in the air. A metaphorical wind of change. Time to go.

It was harder to abandon your life in this era, he knew. Airports were worst of all, thanks to widespread terrorism. It had taken a lot of dirty dealing to get his new existence ironed out, but his fresh self was now boiled down to a few documents in his pocket: a passport, a birth certificate, a national ID, a bank account, some assigned numbers that marked his place in humanity. The name at least was a familiar one: Park Jinyoung. He’d used it before. Korea was convenient like that, with its limited supply of names. There were plenty of other Park Jinyoungs out there, and no dots would be connected back to the one who lived there years and years ago. And even if people thought Jinyoung looked exactly like him, he could claim that past person as a great-grandfather or something. Hardly a snag at all.

He arrived at the bus stop, settling his suitcase at his feet. It was mostly filled with clothes and toiletries. It was easier to start fresh with everything else. He’d lost his drive to reinvent himself entirely everywhere he went, but he also didn’t believe in dragging his past existences around the world with him. Furniture and belongings were easily replaceable.

A few minutes later, he heard another suitcase rolling up behind him. He didn’t glance to see who it was. Give a traveler a single opening, and they’d tell you their life story and ask for yours. Where are you going? Why? Do you know anyone there? What will you do when you arrive? It was a lot of effort to waste on someone you’d immediately forget and whose answers you really, deep down, didn’t give two s about in the grander scheme of your life. But travelers loved to pretend like they cared, or else just wanted the opportunity to blab about their own vacations to an equally uncaring pair of ears.

Jinyoung checked his ticket. Airports were relatively new, and weren’t yet second nature. Centuries of boats and horses were still imprinted within him, and he had to remind himself sometimes that it would probably take some environmental disaster before he was back to using them to get around as a matter of necessity. Hopefully said environmental disaster would take the whole world out with it and it would all be a moot point.

The bus arrived and Jinyoung got in. The person behind him followed. Jinyoung took a seat in the middle of the bus. The person behind him did the same. He could tell from a quick glance out of the corner of his eye that it was a man, a young one. He wasn’t curious to learn anything more. He stared out the window at the dry California landscape, deliberately ignoring him.

“Um, hey, you, excuse me?”

Jinyoung sighed. People and their incessant need to bother people who have absolutely nothing to do with them. He turned his head. A pair of brown eyes attached to a handsome face stared back. Of course, the definition of handsome changed with the era, but this person was the kind of classical handsome that outlasted the changing trends of history. He would have been handsome ten years ago, one hundred, one thousand, all the way back to the beginning.

“What?” Jinyoung said in an unwelcoming voice. He wasn’t someone who gave privilege to the beautiful. Or anyone. He preferred not to associate in general.

“Hey, yeah, I happened to catch a glimpse of your ticket at the bus stop,” the guy said. “You’re going to Korea, too?”

Oh no, Jinyoung thought. Oh, no, no, no. I am not here to spend the next twenty minutes to the airport finding common ground over a shared destination. You and I—whoever you are—have nothing in common. Nothing. Not one thing.

“What about it?” Jinyoung asked.

“Help me,” the guy said. “Please. I’m going there for the first time. And this will be my first time on a plane, so I need all the guidance I can get.”

“Did you not do any research about Korea or the airport?”

The guy blinked. “Uh…yes…of course I did research.”

“Then I’m sure I have nothing else to add.” Jinyoung gave him a quelling glare. “If you’re going on this trip by yourself, handle it yourself.”

“I’m going there to live, though. As a university student. It would take a little bit more than online research to feel fully prepared for.”

“Learn by experience.” Jinyoung picked through his pocket for a pair of earbuds. He wasn’t finding them fast enough.

“Are you having a bad day?” the guy asked quietly.

“Excuse me?”

“You seem miserable.”

“Quite. So if you don’t mind…”

“Um…” The guy paused for a long moment. “Is there…is there anything I can do to cheer you up?”

“No.”

“I heard this was trendy in Korea.” The guy flashed finger hearts and winked. “Did I do it right?”

Jinyoung grit his teeth. “You know what else is trendy in Korea? Political corruption. Classism. Lookism. Xenophobia. Good luck with that last one, by the way.” Jinyoung felt a little chip in his hardened heart. There was a very limited spectrum of things he cared about anymore, but what had become of his country was one of them. Not that it had been perfect by any means, back in its early years. All the same, it had been irreparably changed from its original vision, distorting into something he could barely recognize. Whenever he read the news about it, he had to resist the urge to scream no, this isn’t what I wanted! This isn’t what I meant to happen!

But the thread of fault determinedly traced back to him. And due to your unjustness, unjustness will become a part of the human world. That would be his epitaph, if he was ever lucky enough to have a grave.

“I unfortunately don’t have the cure for cynicism on me” the obnoxious guy sitting next to him said with a heavy sigh.

Jinyoung wanted to strangle him. “Could you just…”

“Shut up?” The guy leaned into him a little. “OK, Mr. Doom. I’m scared. I’m ing terrified. And it would really give me some peace of mind if you found your compassion and at the very least told me a thing or two about what I might be headed into, so the terror of the unknown doesn’t make me piss myself. Please.” His brown eyes turned beseeching. “I’m doing this alone because I can’t just demand people to uproot themselves just because I want to. That doesn’t mean I want to do this alone.”

Jinyoung took a deep breath. He didn’t want to take the time and bother, but really, what did he have in the world but time and unlimited things to be bothered by? In the scope of his life, this would be such a small blip that it wouldn’t even register. Why not just get it over with?

“Fine,” he said through grit teeth. “I’ll give you the step by step of the airport. But don’t ask me about Korea. I’ve never been there.” Or at least not its current version. The last time he’d been had been years before the war, back when it wasn’t split in two and people didn’t look like make-believe dolls crafted out of plastic and insecurity. He was just as much of a stranger to the country that had arisen in its place as this brat of a human being was.

“You haven’t been?” the guy echoed. “Sorry, I thought you were Korean. So why are you going now?”

“Because I am Korean, ethnically. There’s an old family home there. And I wanted to do some research. Is any of this relevant? Can we establish that it has nothing to do with you and move on?”

“Oh…OK. I was just making small talk.” The guy looked momentarily annoyed, but then shrugged. “Which I guess is hypocritical. I hate small talk. I hate talking.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“I’m nervous. I’m not capable of my usual calm.” He took two deep breaths. “OK. Walk me through the airport.”

Jinyoung explained each of the steps. He hadn’t been overly enthused about airplanes upon their integration into transportation, but while in America, they had simply been too practical to pass up. America was sprawling, and to get where you needed to go without hassle, it was good to have a shortcut. And even he couldn’t help but be impressed by the things human came up with as time passed.

“What about customs?” the guy asked. “Do you think they’ll give me a hard time?”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. My Korean’s pretty bad. I have a tattoo.”

“You’ll live,” Jinyoung said. Until you don’t. Lucky you.

 They made it to the airport. Unfortunately for Jinyoung, he couldn’t just flee his unwanted companion, considering that the other guy was blocking the aisle and taking his time getting all his bags together.

“What’s your name, by the way?” the guy asked.

“Jinyoung,” Jinyoung said, if only to get used to saying it again.

“A very Korean name for someone who’s never been to Korea.”

“My parents didn’t want me to lose my roots.”

“My name’s Mark.”

I didn’t ask, Jinyoung thought.

“I’m well aware that you don’t care,” Mark said mildly. “But I think it was the hand of god that we met. What were the chances of me running into another person headed to the same destination?”

“When you get into the airport, there will be plenty.”

“But you were the one I met first. It means something. Everything happens for a-”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” Jinyoung snapped. Mark sighed, finally moving out of the aisle.

Jinyoung tried to shake him off inside the airport, first by going to the bathroom (Mark was waiting for him outside it), and then by trying to run off while Mark tried to figure out the check-in machine. That worked for a time, but they both wound up in the same line to check their baggage, and were funneled into the same line for security. Before Jinyoung knew it, Mark was sitting beside him on the bench outside of the x-ray machine, sliding back into his sneakers as Jinyoung tried to get his loafers on and attempt to run away again.

Naturally, they had to go to the same terminal and the same gate. Jinyoung debated insisting he needed to do some shopping or get some food, but he figured Mark would follow him no matter what he tried. Instead, he sank grudgingly into one of the chairs and threw back his head.

For as long as this world remembers your name and the sin you brought upon it, you will know no rest, oh bringer of calamity, oh wellspring of justice...

“This is crazy,” Mark said suddenly.

Jinyoung cracked open an eye. Mark was staring at his plane ticket. “Yes?”

“Look at our seat numbers!”

Jinyoung could almost hear ominous music playing as he looked. Their seats were right beside each other.

“What did I tell you?” Mark said, looking relieved. “The hand of God. Fate.”

“Fate doesn’t exist.”

“What?”

“There’s no one out there determining what will happen or arranging specific encounters.”

Mark tilted his head. “So you don’t believe in God? Or you just don’t believe he’s meddling?”

Jinyoung wasn’t about to get into the extent of gods out there to Mark, who had clearly used the singular and was most likely a Christian. “Higher powers don’t care about individuals to that extent.”

“Then what do they care about?”

“Themselves.”

“Ah, like the Greek and Norse pantheons, right? The kind who have very human-like personalities and do things for largely selfish reasons.” Mark nodded. “I’m a er for those. But most people don’t actually believe in them anymore. Do you?”

“What’s with this conversation, anyways?” Jinyoung asked, derailing it.

“You were the one who started it, insisting that fate wasn’t real. I just responded. Anyways, I’m in religious studies.”

Jinyoung laughed bitterly. “Of course you are.”

“Why is that funny?”

“Oh, no reason. Want my advice?”

“Make like a tree and leaf me alone?”

“That would be appreciated. But you’d be doing the world a favor if you burned every religious text you could find.”

Mark finally looked a little bit repulsed. Note to self, Jinyoung thought. Bash religion and get him off my back. “That’s a very extreme view,” Mark said measuredly. “Do you think it’ll stop our war problem, or something?”

“It will set a lot of people free,” was all Jinyoung said. “Including people who haven’t been free in the longest time.”

Until the last mind forgets your stain of evil upon the world and the last page bearing your name burns to ash, freedom shall never again be within your grasp...

“There’s no way to be completely free,” Mark said.

Yes, Jinyoung thought. Oh, yes there is. It’s called dying.

They were silent for a long moment. “Do you also not believe in soulmates?” Mark asked at length.

Jinyoung snorted. “What, do you?”

“Still deciding. People would argue that God doesn’t assign those to the gays.”

Jinyoung tilted his head, momentarily confused before remembering. It was one of those arbitrary "morals" of human uality things, one he often forgot about based on its constant state of flux. He could remember times when love was open and spread liberally, times when it was a back door happening to the greater social necessity of marriage, times when it was entirely private and unmentionable, times when it was restricted, times when it was oppressed. It felt like humanity was always fighting a battle with its urges, struggling to control a stream that was meant to flow naturally. Jinyoung could never truly understand it.

But he supposed this was an era still fighting against the made-up rules of the eras before it. It was not something to make light of.

“If you look for something hard enough, you usually find it,” Jinyoung said.

“Huh?”

“What I mean to say is that if you look for someone to love, you’ll find someone to love. I wouldn’t worry about being alone. Unless you want to be alone.”

“Sometimes, I just don’t know.” Mark rested his chin on his knuckles. “There’s something about you, did you know that?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re different. You’re, what…23? 24?”

“25,” Jinyoung said, once again just to get used to saying so. It was the age he always restarted his identity with, as it matched closely to his physical appearance.

“So, five years older than me. But you talk as if you’re two thousand years older.”

Not a bad guess, Jinyoung thought. Just off by a couple of millions. “Which may say something about your maturity,” he said aloud.

Mark grinned. “Maybe it does. Whatever it is, I like it. You’re a rare kind of fascinating. This is going to be a fun flight.”

Jinyoung groaned. “For one of us.”

For as long as this world remembers your name and the sin you brought upon it, you will know no rest…

And thanks to Mark, Jinyoung barely got any rest on the flight to Korea. At the beginning of the flight, his nerves were firing and he was being accordingly bothersome, chattering to Jinyoung incessantly about his whole decision-making process in choosing which country to go to for his studies and asking all kinds of questions Jinyoung wasn’t interested in supplying answers to.

Mid-way, he began to calm a little, and his more genuine personality began to surface. When he wasn’t skittish, he struck Jinyoung as being more like a monk. Slow and soft, but thoughtful and genuine. He didn’t talk as much, but the words had more weight to them and didn’t bother Jinyoung nearly as much. Which was faint praise, considering someone talking to him still grated on his nerves like a violin hitting only wrong notes.

You who wished to rule the humans so dearly that it led you to trickery, live among them and learn to your peril the pain human existence can bring to you.

Jinyoung had always taken that to mean the humans were toxic to him. That he’d been dropped into their world with a natural allergy to them, and their every word and action slowly whittled away at his wellbeing and sanity. He could believe it. Or maybe that was too literal—maybe having to live among the beings he’d corrupted left guilt eating away at him, and the torture was because of them, but of his own making.

In any case, Mark was less bothersome than he could be. But he was still a nagging, torturous bother, and Jinyoung couldn’t wait until he never had to see him again. Until he could disappear into the quiet and exist in the minimum extent of pain.

Mark finally started dozing off during the last hours of the flight. “Jinyoung?” he said sleepily.

“Yes?” Jinyoung asked, not turning his face away from the window.

“Will you help me in the airport on the Korean side?”

“If you’ll leave me alone after.”

“I will,” Mark said. He closed his eyes. Moments later, his head had fallen against Jinyoung’s shoulder and he was asleep.

Jinyoung’s Korean was now outdated, he found. It was something he hated about this era, how quickly everything was determined to change in the span of a few years. Back in the beginning, things had developed slowly. Humans took their sweet time learning and evolving. Civilizations could rise and fall in the blink of an eye, but society itself plodded along.

Not so anymore. Korea could have been an entirely different nation for all he knew. Where had all these high rises come from? These clothes? These slang words that no one would have been able to interpret just ten years ago, and ten years from now would again be meaningless?

He took a bracing breath. He’d have to learn just enough to navigate this new environment. When the time came for him to leave again and he was back a century or two later, it would be entirely different, anyways. No need to commit himself too hard to interpreting this impermanence.

“Wow,” Mark said quietly beside him. “This is…not what I’m used to.”

“As is most of the world, I’d imagine.”

“True.” He glanced around. “The food looks fantastic, at least. And the consumerism…that’s familiar.”

“Hmm.” Jinyoung glanced at his watch. “Well, you’re out of customs. Time to part ways.”

To his surprise, Mark looked almost like he was going to cry. “You can’t stay and help me out a little longer?” he asked faintly.

“You have a host family, right?” Jinyoung asked.

Mark nodded. “They’re on their way to pick me up.”

“Then you don’t need me anymore.”

“Oh…I guess…I guess not.” Mark swallowed. “Jinyoung?”

“Yes?"

“Can I…can I call you? If I need help or anything? I just think it would be nice…having someone out there I know.”

“I’m going to be buying a new phone,” Jinyoung said. “And getting a Korean number. I don’t have anything to give you.”

“Social media…?”

“Don’t use it.”

“LINE? Kakaotalk? Anything?”

Jinyoung shook his head. Mark looked at him despairingly. It was of a familiar variety: what’s going to become of me?

Such a pointless thought. The trajectory of his life would follow that of most humans. School, work, marriage, family-building, transitioning from a caregiver to a care receiver, and then death. He would become a regular human cog in the wheel, and then one day nourish the earth with his body.

But his feelings were real. Jinyoung forgot that too often. In the brief story of this human’s life, this change was as momentous for him as it was an insignificant blip to Jinyoung.

So at last, Jinyoung opened his wallet and pulled out a piece of paper. He had memorized the updated address and didn’t need it anymore. He handed it to Mark.

“Here,” he said. “You can find me here.” A pause. “But only in an emergency. Don’t try my patience.”

As soon as Mark took the paper, Jinyoung nodded and walked away. This time, Mark didn’t follow.

One thing that didn’t change even if time passed was that money talked. It had been years since he’d left his house in Korea, but he’d continued to wire money for its maintenance and upkeep. And here it still stood, and incredibly outdated and more than a bit musty hanok, but structurally sound and intact. He took a deep breath of the stale air, then set his suitcase down on the floor. And here we go again.

Out of all the places he went to, Korea was the place he had to return to the most. Not because of any special attachment, but because it had a way of undoing his work from his previous visits. Oral history was alive and well; no matter how many pages he ripped out of books and burned, the storytellers went on telling stories, and his name reappeared in the texts he had removed himself from. And now, thanks to certain inventions, it was like holding back an avalanche. Books could so easily be printed and reprinted that it was nearly impossible to stop.

Nearly. Not quite a Sisyphean task, though. Some things were lost to history, never to be remembered or revived. And Korea’s hold on the oldest forms of its religion were tenuous at best. Buddhism had swept in, and then Christianity. No one actually believed anymore. They just persisted in remembering, due to that false human ideology that the past needs to be remembered.

Still, both the internet and print-on-demand complicated things. He wasn’t going to tackle the internet yet—that could be his grand finale, a mass-hacking and data deletion once he figured out how those things worked—but he was fully intending on continuing his war path against the printed word.

He’d get down to business soon, marking down all the libraries and warehouses and booksellers he could find. For now, he opened his suitcase and pulled out his clothes, setting them down in drawers. He tested the electricity and water. He wrote up a grocery list. He looked up the directions to the nearest bank so he could access the money he’d been hoarding through the years to pay for said groceries.

He checked the fireplace. There were some matches on the mantle, but no firewood. He’d have to take care of that himself.

He pulled out a piece of paper from his back pocket, which he’d torn out from one of the books in Mark’s carry on while he’d been sleeping. It wasn’t a textbook, thank god—textbooks were hard to eliminate, given how often they were printed and reprinted. It was a little pocket book written in English about world religions. The relevant part had only amounted to one sentence, but one sentence was enough.

Jinyoung took a match, lit the paper, and dropped it into the fireplace grate as it burned, the names Mireuk and Seokga going up in smoke.

Jinyoung thought of Mark before going to bed, a rare lapse for him. He didn’t usually think of humans as individuals in his mind. He thought of them a larger body—humankind. Sometimes he broke them down by geography—Americans, Koreans, etc. He rarely divided them into smaller categories than that. He thought of the separate people he interacted with almost never.

It was safer that way. He’d learned that quickly, by necessity. When he’d been deposited into the world, it hadn’t been in an uninhabited space where he could immediately hide and begin to distance himself from the rest of the world. He’d been left in the middle of a human settlement, unclothed and unconscious. He’d been rescued by a young family, a mother and a father and a baby girl with black hair and long lashes, and been taken to the village shaman. The shaman had deemed Jinyoung’s arrival to the village ‘fated by the hand of the gods,’ much in the way Mark had foolishly described their own meeting, and claimed the heavens had given him as a gift of good fortune.

Jinyoung had known this wasn’t true. He was a curse from the heavens, not a gift, and was a symbol of calamity, not good fortune. But Jinyoung had run with the lie, fearing that the humans would turn on him if they knew who he truly was. He did his part to help the settlement and fully intended to use his position in the village to encourage people to throw off their belief in their gods and forget them entirely.

He was also a curious observer of this world he had once sought to rule, and observing the humans monopolized more of his thoughts than even his mission, which had not seemed so pressing then, not so much a torture but a challenge. But what he observed was only heartbreak. The young father who had rescued him lost his wife to childbirth of a stillborn baby. The daughter herself developed a disease of the flesh and died before her third year on the earth. The father himself passed after only thirty years on the earth—few were blessed to last much longer.

Jinyoung learned then the extent of unjustness in the world. Loved ones were born only to die, and time with them was as fleeting as a flake of snow falling on a warm stretch of ground. And yet they loved each other with the all faith in the world that it was eternal and endless, and in the blink of an eye, they were gone and replaced by new flickering flames just as quickly blown out.

They never learned, but Jinyoung did the moment the man who rescued him watched his wife perish in his arms. He would not love, for love didn’t last. He would not grow attached to these lives that began and ended to so little purpose.

He would not look too hard at the unjustness they suffered every day of their lives, the illness, the overwork, the prejudice, the lies, the sorrow. He was the source of all of it, and all the new forms of unjustness that would befall them as time went on. He was not the true creator. And yet this unjust world was his masterpiece, his legacy, his anchor.

And so it was. And so it is.