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The desire to be loved is the last illusion
Give it up and you will be free.
Margeret Atwood
The air breathes back in the stuffed heat. The sinking feeling of his boots as he stepped into the wet land is aggravated by the humidity in his nose, the surplus saliva in his mouth. He would call it drowning if he hasn’t experienced it before. Today is simply a hot day.
“How long are you going to keep walking?”
He doesn’t look back. The man is alert enough to defend himself, but not adept enough to fight an enemy charging full front. There’s a loud sigh.
“Stop a little, will you? We haven’t properly introduced,” he says, walking in front of him. The other men stop in their track, clearly listening to the leader of the group. “I am Kang Hamchan. These are my men. You saved our lives, kid.”
His wet hand comes to rest on his shoulder. It’s foolish to come forward to someone with an open palm like that. This reminds him how 002 once approached a feral cat, malnourished and mistreated by the weather: bended knees and opened palms. It’s dangerous for them to approach something that you do not mean to kill.
“It’s not reasonable to have a child in the battlefield. What’s your name?”
And 001 remembers 002 had his hands on the cat’s neck and gave it a swift death. It barely let out a sound. It’s the only mercy 002 is capable of giving.
His breath is hot; trapped in the cloth over his mouth when he exhaled. This place is a living hell. It’s a hot day. The cat’s head is snapped in half, its ears looping down like it’s begging for food.
They were finishing their last round of training for the night when Ijin receives a message from Dayeon.
One man throws him a towel and wraps an arm around his shoulder. “Girlfriend?”
“My sister.”
Dayeon (18:45)
I see you to look at these! This is important!!!!!!!
[3 pictures sent]
Ijin was picturing bloodied bodies in an abandoned warehouse, battered bodies in a barely lit room. He clicks on the first picture with a rescue plan in his head.
“I didn’t know our Ijin could smile like that!” Another man chimes in with a grin. “Such a family man. My wife would’ve loved to have a son like you.”
“Thank you.”
There’s a weight on his head; his hair is kindly ruffled. “So polite,” Ijin hears the shuffling of movement. A head peaks in. “What’s your sister texting you about?”
“My birthday. She says it’s next week.”
“You didn’t even tell us about it!”
“I didn’t know.”
Dayeon (18:47)
Grandpa likes the blue one, but we want you to decide.
They had something similar for Dayeon’s birthday. Confused, Ijin holds up the phone to the two men looking at him with a puzzled face.
“She’s asking me to pick one,” Ijin says, forgetting to phrase it as a question.
“What is this?”
Ijin seemingly gathered the rest of men to his phone. Seokju scoffs at him.
“The one on the left is not an option,” Seokju says. “It’s so pompous. Do everyone a favour and choose the white one.”
A man’s hand shot up. “I like the pink one!”
“I agree with Seokju! That left one is—“
“What, but that one is—”
The voices overlap— terrible, absurd, it looks too sweet? — before Seokju looks at him.
“When is your birthday, Ijin?”
“Next week.”
“I’m aware. I’m asking for the date.”
Ijin looks at his phone. Dayeon did not give him a clue.
“Next week,” Ijin says, and hopes Dayeon tells him the details when he gets home tonight.
001 doesn’t get sick often. His body is aware of what is allowed in his situation. Fevers and injuries are not sickness as long they allow for mobility; the Numbers worked together to guard it; broken arms strapped with scrapped bandages; wounds stitched together with skin adhesives.
“It’s dangerous to be sick,” 006 says, listening to his rash breathing and looking over the pool of blood from his wound. “We are short on food. Clean your wound before an infection.”
“Water is running out,” 002 adds.
They are not the kind to voice the obvious. He is aware that it’s because he might die. 002 is walking in front of them, and they know the cost of a dead teammate in a team mission. There is always one of them in front. 001 watches 002’s broad, stiff back, and knows that the greatest show of confidence is to show your back to someone.
He doesn’t have a lot of secrets because he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember his past, and there are not a lot of secrets to spare in killing, in this kiln where they only harden under the heat— but it is a shared secret between the Numbers that they are expected to eliminate the one bringing the mission down. It is a begrudged, half-followed one, in direct conflict to their other secret.
“There is a cave under 100 meters,” 002 says. “Get ready.”
It’s a shared, shamed secret, caring for each other. It’s unspeakable. 001 patches his wounds while moving in cadence to the group.
“We can debrief on our next plan of action there,” 002 says.
006 stares ahead. “What do you think, 001?”
001 nods. They walk to the cave in a heavy step. It seems that the Numbers can only tell each other half-truths.
Here’s what 001 never told anyone: he doesn’t mind being sick. In his feverish sickness, he begins to dream.
Ijin celebrates his birthday with more people than he expected. His friends found out about it earlier than he did, apparently, given how Ijin walked in the classroom with a bouquet of origami flowers in his hand, and some pink and gold bordered letters with seals from the dollar store, topped with a bright red Shin ramen on top.
“Thank you.”
Jaeheyong pinches his fingers together and raises them high. “Okay,” he says, “now try to say it with a pitch higher.”
Ijin tries while balancing the gift in his hands. “Thank you?”
Jaeheyong’s face twists, his eyebrows over his forehead. “Higher!”
Ijin doesn’t think he can go higher. Hyeokjin whispers in his ears. “He’s telling you to act happier, you idiot.”
But Ijin is happy. He has rarely been happier. He has just been dreaming a lot lately.
“I spent one full week of allowance for this,” Jaeheyong mumbles, but doesn’t budge when Hyeokjin pushes him next to Ijin. “Happy birthday, Ijin.”
He dreams. He remembers.
In the airplane, a child of his age sits a few seats away from him. The child smiles brighter than he feels like he ever will be able to, his small arms tugging a young woman’s purple sleeve. When are we going to arrive, mom? Can we play games?
The child looks like him, but children look alike the same way small things look; small, poisonous things— the difference in colors and shape doesn’t matter so much as they sting. Ijin looks at the child in his dream and thinks how easy it is to break his neck, like squeezing the soft spine of a worm.
He is sick. He is feverish. He dreams of an ugly larva drilling the dirt, and hungry, starved, has no choice to eat another worm to live.
The airplane is loud when it crashed. 001 remembers tugging at the unmoving woman’s purple sleeve, opening his mouth, the word mom shaping his lips beside a dead child.
“My name,” 001 says, caught between wet dirt and the bright light of the tropics. “My name is Ijin.”
002 meets him at a convenience store far from his house. Ijin would not risk it, and so would he. There is something akin to kinship left between them, like an ugly scar brandished on their skin.
“I did not know you had a birthday,” 002 says, his face stoic. There are lines under his eyes and chin, pale but visible, the small evidence of the past.
“Everyone has birthdays.”
“I don’t have one.”
Ijin pauses. “You can make it any day you want. It’s just a birthday.”
002 looks at him, his arms still crossed. It’s his most natural pose. The bulge beneath his clothes indicates some kind of bullet proof jacket.
“Mission?”
002’s gaze doesn’t waver an inch. His index finger twitches as he moves to take his food. “You don’t have to know,” he says.
He seems to want to keep his silence before closing his eyes, seemingly in defeat. It is a cold evening—something that Ijin has only started to get used to. The heat is lunged somewhere, lovingly nested between the arteries, just above his ribcages—the scorching summer heat.
Even in the cold, 002 looks at him the same. 001 wonders briefly if he is proof that things don’t really change.
“We don’t have the right to have birthdays, 001,” 002 says. 001 feels the edge in that voice like that day when he was half-feverish and half-dreaming, the urgency of finding somewhere safe. “You know that.”
“I do.”
“You must have been desperate, then, to play family with them.”
“The Numbers are still my family.”
Something flares in his eyes, and it’s dangerous. “I thought we were past the sentimentality, 001.”
Ijin knows that. They were past most things. Between his hands lies the leftover packaging of his rice ball. He ought to throw it away.
001 continues, though his voice is small. He is talking to himself. “I thought we were past the illusion that we are allowed to do this,” he says.
He knows. This is to be normal; to love. This is familiar, but Ijin is not familiar with the thudding behind his eyes, the slight prickling of his skin. “We are no longer at the camp.”
002’s eyes are dark when he stares. The heat stares back. The heat of the cup noodle steams his face; it blurs his features, softens them almost.
“It is what it seems,” 002 says, gesturing this quiet neighborhood, the moonlight streaming down their small red table. “We have left. You don’t have to tell anyone that we didn’t. You don’t even have to tell yourself that, 001.”
001 doesn’t use his name and Ijin knows why. Ijin would have never met him.
“I’m happy to have met the Numbers,” Ijin says, but even he knows the truth. There is no denying that it is a tragic thing, to love people that had no right to love.
“I don’t think we should meet anymore, 001.”
“I understand.”
“Of course you would,” he says, and there is something almost fond in his voice, “you left us first.”
“I did.”
“Are you happy now, pretending to be a different person?”
Ijin thinks about it. “Yes,” he says after a pause. It’s the truth. Ijin has never been a good liar.
Maybe that’s why Ijin dreams so much these days. He is not sick, he is not feverish—but he feels akin to that time in the cavern, life flashing before his eyes.
A sound interrupts them. It’s a small black cat mewling pitifully, his legs injured, the back of his spine grown out of his skin like small stones. 002 hands him some of his rice ball. A few years prior, it would have stopped mewling in his hand.
“There were many strays born out of strays in that camp,” 002 says. “I killed so many of them.”
“They were not going to survive in that condition. You had to kill them.”
“Yes,” 002 says, “but so were you, and I couldn't kill you.”
The stray devours the rice as silence falls between them.
002’s profile is a stoic thing. The cat is eating the rest of the salmon. “They seek out other strays for food. Some even pretend to be their offsprings to have even a scrap to feed themselves. You know what happens to those who play family games.”
“Yes,” Ijin says. His phone buzzes. It’s Dayeon, probably another reminder on the choice of cake. “I know.”
“What are we going to do?”
“The target is weakened by our previous attack. He can be eliminated alone.”
001 scoffs in the silence. He wants to get up before a hand pushes him back to the cold floor. The hand lingers in its heat, and 001’s body is carried to the inside of the cave—and softly, so softly, he hears from afar the shuffling of someone’s shoes.
“002 left,” 006 says. “He tells me to stay with you.”
001 is hot all over. His clothes stick to his skin like dirt, like worms. A small centipede strides over the back of his neck, the legs digging into him all bloody. There is something ugly in his mouth, in his head.
He hears himself say: “You should leave me here.”
There is a scoff, then a laugh. “002 is going to kill me if I do,” he says. “I think it admirable that he cares about you the way he does. He doesn’t have anything else to care about other than us. I think that’s why.”
None of them would care about each other if there were something else to care for. 001 breathes out. The ugly thing in him stays. Something warm touches his forehead, but the world is burning. That touch almost feels cold.
“Just rest. I will be here when you wake up.”
001 sits a few seats next to a child in an airplane and wonders what games she is going to play with him.
Life flashes before him. Only 001 knows that it is not his life. These are not his dreams.
001 wakes up.