Perhaps I Love It
As if he weren't actually scolding me.
Se-gun snorted a quiet laugh. Either way, he wanted those paintings in his hands. Just thinking about them hanging in a gallery for some personal exhibition—on display for ordinary people to gawk at—made him restless. It felt, somehow, like a lover being kidnapped and violated in front of him.
"What do you want with the painter?"
"To take the paintings, obviously."
"You want every single piece from a show that just opened? And what are you going to do with that many canvases? The money alone would be ridiculous, and he's almost certainly contracted the gallery to handle all sales. Don't tell me you're planning to threaten the artist, Boy."
"Who knows? If I have to, I might."
"Then I can't introduce you. Why not buy them properly through a broker?"
Bill Murray's refusal was absolute. Se-gun only smirked.
"You don't want to lose one of your better raw-material suppliers, do you? Relax. I'm not clumsy enough to go around announcing that you sold me a client's information—and I already know the painter, anyway."
"…Fine. Nothing I can do about it, then."
In the end, Se-gun walked away with the contact information. A drug dealer leaking anything about his own distribution network should have been unthinkable—but Han Se-gun was a different story. Ever since Sarhyuk had become a vampire, Se-gun had been the best source of raw material for Psychedelic Moon. Crossing this particular bastard never ended well.
Of course, Psychedelic Moon was a cocktail drug; you never needed much of it. But anyone who had tasted it once found ordinary narcotics hopelessly insufficient. If Se-gun cut Bill Murray off and designated someone else as his dealer, the market share Murray had carved out for Psychedelic Moon would tilt overnight.
"See you."
"Ah—Boy. Watch yourself. MPs, cops, the whole lot of them… they're starting to smell what you are."
Bill Murray offered the warning, but Se-gun pretended not to hear and was already out of the building. Given that man's hearing, there was no chance he had missed it.
"Born to be wild?"
That kid really was wild. Like someone racing toward death this very second—leaving nothing he loved behind, charging forward like a madman. Still, siding with him against the U.S. military police was a favor Bill Murray would rather not do.
"Well. Good luck, kid."
Bill Murray sank into his chair and looked at the pamphlet. The world of the mad moon. The world that young man had stared at over and over. A world you could only see if you were already out of your mind…
Psychedelic Moon was a cocktail drug sought by addicts of other substances who wanted a higher pleasure. Trace it from the top of the chain and you reached the end consumer without many steps in between.
"This the place?"
Se-gun studied what was supposedly a painter's atelier. A farmhouse in Pyeongchang, Gangwon-do—nothing about it looked like anything but a farmhouse. It had a certain quiet charm, he supposed. Of course, if "quiet charm" meant drug parties and prostitutes sprawled all over the interior, then the Korean language itself had been polluted.
Still—even if the creator was garbage, art existed separately from the person who made it. Life is short, art is long, wasn't that the saying? And Se-gun was in no position to freely condemn anyone else for being trash. He himself was evil incarnate.
"Doesn't look like he's at the atelier."
No reason a man in the middle of a solo exhibition would have come all the way back to a rural studio. Se-gun sighed, parked his bike by the roadside, and stepped into the little hole-in-the-wall shop across the way for a drink and a few packs of snacks.
Lunch hour was approaching, yet the place was still deserted. Warm sunlight, a cool breeze. Se-gun unzipped the top of his racing suit, sat under a tree, and ate while staring blankly at the landscape.
"Love, huh."
Whenever he thought about love, all that came to mind were TV dramas and movies—and it irritated him. This wasn't the kind of scenery you were supposed to spoil with thoughts like that, but to Se-gun love was just another human emotion contaminated by mass media. Of course, he needed love more than anyone. Just to quench this hellish loneliness and thirst, it would have been enough if someone simply stayed by his side… but he couldn't allow it.
Think about it. A man who has sharpened his blade for revenge, flirting with some woman, letting others soothe his wounds while he swings the violence of justice around? What cheap plot is that? Hollywood already floods the market with enough of it. You deal out merciless violence to others, and then you want your own wounds comforted? Hilarious. A man who chose means that can never be justified by any reason, wanting human happiness—what a joke.
The moment Se-gun chose violence as the instrument of his revenge, he had already decided the road he would walk. He would fall into hell when he died anyway; he had to be in hell while he lived as well. Without ever tasting a fragment of happiness, he would walk the path of asura befitting a man who practiced evil. Like a wounded coyote dying alone on the prairie—loving no one, loved by no one…
He would die that way.
He was prepared for it. And yet, at some point, something was wetting his face. He didn't need to touch the trail to know it was tears. Se-gun looked out at the blurred landscape and smiled. He smiled while crying. What a vicious aesthetic of the self. No one was forcing him, yet he tormented himself out of pure obsessiveness. Yeah. Maybe he was only making excuses this way because he had no confidence.
Kim Hyung-nam left his house in Donam-dong and drove toward his atelier. A painter in the middle of a solo show rarely had reason to return to the studio. But facing his family at home was harder than sticking his head out of a trench under a hail of bullets. Considering everything he had done to that household, he no longer had the face to meet them. Humanity's steelmaking technology still hadn't advanced far enough to forge a mask that thick.
Halfway back to the atelier, he spotted a young man standing by the roadside. Green-tinted hair, planted there like a totem pole driven into the earth, staring blankly at the setting sun.
"…"
Why had he come? Kim Hyung-nam didn't know. But danger rolled off the youth. The way a child who has never seen a snake still recoils from one by pure instinct, Kim Hyung-nam felt that this man was dangerous.
Above all, those eyes. Eyes that had lived beyond life and death, making hatred their only profession—eyes more vicious than any he had ever seen. And yet they looked so sorrowful, so lonely, that they held a power to make a man lose himself staring into them.
Screeeech!
He hit the brakes without meaning to. Stopping the car and jumping out felt about as safe as hopping out of a jeep inside a safari park—but this was a summons of the soul. If a man couldn't be honest about the call of his own soul, he might as well stick both hands in a cutter and chop them off. A bastard like that had no right to call himself an artist.
"Ah."
Only then did the young man notice his arrival and come back to himself. The sun, sinking in the west, draped the youth's outline in red.
He wore racing armor, yet even through the protectors you could see how perfectly balanced and developed that body was. Not an ounce of spare flesh—honed like a massive jaguar hunting in the jungle, coiled with the spring-loaded explosiveness ready to launch at any moment.
In that instant Kim Hyung-nam wanted to put him on canvas. He had never felt much interest in portraiture—modern painting as a whole barely bothered with it—but every so often there appeared a man who was a painting in himself. The youth standing before him was exactly that kind.
"…You."
"You're Painter Kim Hyung-nam, right?"
They recognized each other and spoke at the same moment. But once they were face to face, neither had anything to say. What were you supposed to open with? You painted those pictures on drugs, didn't you? Or Do you do drugs too? Neither was exactly conversational.
So Kim Hyung-nam looked toward his atelier and said,
"Why don't you come in for a bit?"
"I was planning to anyway. Convenient."
The young man tightened the strap of the long case on his back—a guitar, maybe, or some other instrument—and followed him. He couldn't have lived half of Kim Hyung-nam's years, yet every syllable out of his mouth was pure informal speech, without a scrap of honorific. A blunt type who didn't bother hiding what he felt.
This kid was angry at him. No matter how many decades Kim Hyung-nam had on him, the boy had no intention of taking the weaker position by using polite language. Why he was so furious remained unclear—and yet somehow, Kim Hyung-nam almost understood. Twisted by an emotion he couldn't name, he crooked his mouth.
In general, people called that expression a smile.
Even called an atelier, the structure itself was not so different from an ordinary house. An old farmhouse renovated into a two-story Western-style building: living space on the first floor, studio on the second. The moment you stepped through the entrance, the reek of oils and chemicals hit hard enough to be worrying. And yet the ashtray in the living room was piled into a mountain of cigarette butts—so the painter smoked freely in a place like this.
In a certain sense, he was not so different from a vampire hunter. In the way he treated his own life as expendable, at least.
"Come in. Coffee?"
"I'll pass."
The youth shook his head. Kim Hyung-nam poured coffee from the pot—coffee of indeterminate age—into a cup and looked faintly disappointed. The thought that he'd rather be offered poison than drink that stuff crossed Se-gun's mind, but he kept it to himself.
"…"
A long silence stretched between them. Two complete strangers, after all, with nothing to say. Without either of them proposing it, they climbed to the second-floor workspace.
"What the hell?"
To Se-gun—whose idea of an atelier came from some custom-apartment commercial on TV where a young woman scribbled hysterically on a wall—the scene was a genuine shock. Empty bottles of turpentine everywhere, retort food containers scattered like confetti, empty soju bottles, beer bottles, whiskey bottles…
Under the bottle-deposit system, you could probably make tens of thousands of won right now just hauling this place out. An easel held a blank canvas with nothing painted on it.
Was there really anyone who wanted to live like this?
"Impressive. Leave it long enough and the methane will build up—you'll never need to worry about heating."
"Painters as a species tend to keep their distance from tidiness."
Kim Hyung-nam said it and sat down. Any painter who actually kept things orderly would have been offended, but that was a problem for elsewhere. Se-gun leaned against the windowsill opposite him and looked out at the burning sunset. The atmosphere kept spinning in place, neither of them finding the words they needed—until the painter made an unexpected proposal.
"Just a moment…"
Scritch, scritch, scritch…
He was sketching directly onto the canvas on the easel with charcoal. Some artists drew in a sketchbook first and transferred; others sketched straight onto the canvas. This one was clearly the latter. When Se-gun looked at the drawing… distorted as it was, he could tell it was him.
"My modeling fee is pretty steep."
Se-gun stood, making his refusal clear, and muttered toward the dusk. Kim Hyung-nam asked,
"How much?"
"Every painting of Chae-wol."
"Of course."
Kim Hyung-nam nodded; it was exactly the answer he had expected. Those paintings had not come from him. Yes, drawing inspiration from objects or experiences and transferring it to canvas was a painter's privilege. But the experience could not be merely secondhand.
People look at a painting and see the painter's own expression. But in those Chae-wol works, there was no expression of the man named Kim Hyung-nam. All that existed was Psychedelic Moon—the world of the mad moon where vampires and all manner of mythic monsters tangled together. Most people would never know. Se-gun, at least, knew it perfectly well.
This painter—this man who had stolen Se-gun's world, turned it into pictures, and put it on public display—was someone Se-gun still had no desire to forgive. If the man happened to gain wealth and fame from it, contempt and hatred would erupt like a volcano.
Judging by the reaction to the exhibition so far, wealth and fame were not out of the question. In a recession, luxury goods like paintings shouldn't sell well—and yet the general public was responding. He had brought a new wind into a stagnant market.
"…"
Se-gun quietly watched the twilight. The life of a sunset is very short; after only a moment of setting the sky on fire, the sun slipped west and vanished.
"What is 'that' thing, really?"
The question rose in Kim Hyung-nam unbidden. The young man held himself with a reverence that made him look like a priest worshipping "that." Toward Kim Hyung-nam himself he was hardly reverent—but whenever he spoke of that moon, of Chae-wol, he became devout in a way that clashed violently with his usual roughness. Something like the feeling a Marine has for the Corps, maybe.
"At the very least, it's not something that deserves to be violated by your cheap paintings. If everything can be violated in the name of art, then artists are the basest tyrants of all. I almost understand how the Islamic world felt when they put a hit out on S. Rushdie for The Satanic Verses."
"…"
"Knowing nothing. Not even trying to know. Brandishing an artist's arrogance under the banner of creative freedom. It's genuinely infuriating."
Se-gun said it and turned to look at the other painting tools. Kim Hyung-nam felt a lump of ice slide down his spine. The Satanic Verses had mocked and distorted Muhammad and the Quran; the Islamic world had been so outraged they put a bounty on the author's head. Using that as an example was as good as saying he intended to kill Kim Hyung-nam.
"That's—"
In that instant Se-gun drew a dagger from his coat and threw it. It was so fast Kim Hyung-nam didn't even think of dodging; he froze where he stood. Then, from behind him, came a sound like a cellphone vibrating on a desk.
"Got a few bugs around here."
"…"
The dagger that had skewered a cockroach was buried in the wall, its hilt still quivering. Kim Hyung-nam knew perfectly well how few people in the world could do a thing like that. And he also knew that the moment he had let this man into his house, his life had been placed in the other's hands…
"If I refuse to give you the paintings, will you kill me here and now?"
"Pfft. Hahahahaha. That's a masterpiece. You see me as a robber?"
"If not a robber, what would you prefer? Murderer? Lunatic?"
Se-gun clapped and roared with laughter, then drew a knife from his coat and slashed the easel that held the sketch of himself. With a long ripping sound, a great cross was carved into the canvas. The knife that had ruined it spun like a windmill in Se-gun's grip, then slid back into its sheath as if drawn by a magnet.
"If you really think I'm a murderer or a lunatic, you might want to be more careful with your mouth. It's sad that I can't deny it—but if anyone in this world has the right to own those paintings, there aren't many, and I am definitely one of them."
Se-gun looked at Kim Hyung-nam as if waiting for an answer. At that, Kim Hyung-nam took a capsule from his pocket, crushed it across the back of his hand, and snorted it up.
"Hwaaaaah."
Like a man savoring a hard drink, he shook his head and let the drug take him. Se-gun watched the human getting high in front of him and twisted a bitter smile. As if looking at himself in a mirror. Ah—so this is how ugly and nauseating it looks when someone gets high on drugs. He watched with a sour heart.
"Want some?"
"No. I'm good."
Se-gun shook his head at the painter offering him drugs. Then, suddenly angry, he muttered,
"I use them too—but I hold back unless I need them. I don't take drugs as an end. I use them as a means."
"What are you talking about? I chose this as a means as well."
"Is that right? A hack covering for a lack of talent with a chemical high? Funny. If you have no talent, you get washed out of this field. Is a man like you even worth existing in this world if he has to borrow a drug's strength just to stay? I wouldn't know about scum like me—but I thought artists, at least, valued ends over means. Apparently not."
Se-gun sneered. Of course, the words rebounded on him with nothing to answer them. Was his struggle even worth it if he needed the power of a drug like Psychedelic Moon just to face vampires? If he went through with his plan and blew the Korean branch of Tetra Anax sky-high with explosives, the damage would hit ordinary people who were neither vampires nor hunters—and it would be the largest, worst bombing since the founding of the nation. Did he have to fight vampires even if it meant causing a disaster of that scale?
"…You're steeped in Dadaism. At your age."
"Dadaism? Not nihilism?"
"Your education is lacking."
Kim Hyung-nam stuck a cigarette between his lips and lit it. Maybe it was the drugs. When he exhaled smoke into the air, he saw a vision of new colors being mixed and crushed on a palette that still wasn't dry. This carnival of melting color drove him mad. Beauty that had left reality behind. If only he could properly capture those moment-to-moment changes on canvas…
So he had picked up the brush—and gotten caught by a friend like this. The first time he saw Se-gun standing entranced in the gallery, it had felt exactly like being caught cheating on a test.
In any case, having his qualifications as a painter questioned by someone far younger was unpleasant. Even after twenty years of idleness, he had held a brush for more years than that—and throughout those twenty blank years he had still suffered the agony of creation.
"Even so, I can't accept what you're saying. And painters who do drugs aren't some peculiar novelty that appeared yesterday."
"…"
Se-gun laughed at him, of course. He wasn't trying to claim that doing drugs was fine because it wasn't a new peculiarity—and if that was meant as an excuse, it was nothing but a way of devaluing himself. An ordinary artist, not something born yesterday or today… ah, wonderful. But art is a world where a single masterpiece by a genius is worth more than ten thousand mediocre works by mediocre men.
"So you're just going with the herd? You really are cheap."
Se-gun's mockery drove straight into Kim Hyung-nam's chest like a dagger. But Se-gun was already done tormenting this painter.
"I can go as high as two hundred million. Honestly, it's not that I don't have more—but rather than pay beyond that, I'd rather blow up the gallery and burn the paintings. I refuse to be the idiot who pays more than that for pictures by a man who stole someone else's gift."
"…"
A lot of money for such a young bastard. That was what Kim Hyung-nam thought—but two hundred million was enough to settle the contract with Seongran Gallery on decent terms. His credit in the art world would take a hit, but a drop in credit was still better than having your solo exhibition bombed.
"Very well. As soon as the exhibition ends, I'll transfer every painting to you."
"Four days from now—no, three days left, is it? You've extended it, obviously. With that many general visitors. Right?"
Se-gun pinned him with a sharp look. A solo show at a commercial gallery like Seongran—not a museum—tended to run either extremely long or extremely short depending on the gallery's character. Seongran was the latter; the original term had been ten days. But with so many ordinary visitors coming through, the staff had brought up an extension over drinks just the other day. Kim Hyung-nam had accepted, of course—and now he was being told to cancel even that…
"Your possessiveness is something else. Do you love it that much? That thing."
"Me? Love?"
Se-gun looked so incredulous he turned his head toward the window. A half-moon hung high in the sky, yellow as if stricken with jaundice. Se-gun looked at it and snorted a laugh.
"Maybe I do."
The night was loud with the sound of insects. A cool night wind, a darkness clear as if ink had been spilled across the sky, and stars scattered through that darkness like points of light. And among them, a half-moon skiff drifting.
Se-gun gazed at that night sky with a face that looked as if he were dreaming. With an expression that, unfittingly, looked like a man in love…