The Black Hole in the Studio
Kim Taeyoung was thirty, and he managed a shop inside a department store. There was nothing grand about the choice. A junior-college graduate without a single certificate to his name did not have many places that would take him.
It had come down to a simple fork: grind away the body's lifespan on a construction site, or grind away the mind's in customer service. He picked the latter. His days, as a result, were brutal.
"No! Why won't this thing get a refund!"
"I'm truly sorry, ma'am. But under the rules, we can't refund an item without a receipt."
"Hey! You! Do you have any idea how much money I spend in this department store? Your paycheck comes out of me! Out of me! Enough. Refund it. Now."
Why were there so many jin-sang in this country—nightmare customers who seemed to live for a scene? If ten people came through in a day, one or two were guaranteed to be one. Maybe the nation had developed too fast. Far too many people believed that whoever shouted the loudest got their way.
The ones ground down by it were service workers like Kim Taeyoung. Even with a customer like this, he was not allowed to drop his smile. He had to handle them so their feelings wouldn't be hurt. What a load of shit. How were you supposed to keep from bruising the mood of someone who was already furious? If you wanted to soothe them, you gave them exactly what they wanted. Do that, though, and his numbers blew apart on the spot.
"I really am sorry, ma'am. Would a brand discount voucher do instead? I can personally guarantee I'll match you to the highest rate we have."
"A discount? How much? Can you do something like ninety percent?"
Ninety percent? Fuck. A daylight robber of a woman. If this wasn't gabjil—power swung like a club—then nothing was. One wallet, all of four hundred thousand won, and it wasn't even clear she'd bought it in the section he managed. And she wanted a discount that made no sense at all.
But he had to smile. Even after the gabjil and the jin-sang routine ran their course, the customer still had vicious tools left: the department store's customer board, a claim filed straight to headquarters.
"I can't go as high as ninety, but I can do forty percent for you. This is something I'm doing only for you, ma'am. I'd be using a discount card of my own."
"Only forty? And you still won't refund me?"
"I really am sorry about that."
"Tsk. Nothing to be done, then. Fine. I'll be back, so don't you forget what you just said."
The nightmare customer kept up the gabjil attitude to the very end and walked out of the lounge. A deep sigh escaped him. He was only doing it to eat, but he was sick to death of it. On the department-store ladder—gap, eul, byeong, jeong—his place sat somewhere around byeong. Lower than an eul, and his job was apologizing and bowing his head, over and over.
When do I get to be the one on top, just once?
Work a department-store floor long enough and you felt it too clearly: the customers were people from another world. His monthly pay barely cleared three million won, and when the numbers came in badly it could sink into the low two millions. The people who walked through here spent five million, ten million, in a single hour, easy as breathing. Even guests younger than he was. Even minors. They really were from somewhere else.
To them, Kim Taeyoung was Employee A, or Talking Prop B. They might not even have been conscious that what they were doing was gabjil. A thing that wasn't a person had failed to obey, so they got angry and treated it roughly. That was all.
"Manager."
Jo Sua stepped into the lounge the nightmare customer had just left. She was eighteen, a senior whose college entrance exam was already behind her, working a short part-time shift until she started university.
Up until a few years ago, the trend had been not to hire anyone who wouldn't stay on for at least a year. These days almost nobody applied for work that paid this badly, so the store had swallowed the bitter pill and hired her anyway.
He wasn't the owner, so it wasn't his problem. If anything, he was glad. Jo Sua was pretty enough to debut as a celebrity. He had his own selfish interest in that. He couldn't show it. The age gap between them was more than ten years. She was still a minor, and laying a hand on a minor was a crime.
"I'm sorry. This is all because of me, for no reason."
"It's not. She came in looking for a fight. Whoever stepped up would've gotten the same treatment. So don't take it to heart."
"Ah... thank you. I really thought I was done for..."
"Done for how? And even if something did happen, what were you going to do about it? You're a three-month temp anyway. Don't be scared. Handle it like this: even if I get fired, I just go off to college and that's the end of it."
He meant the advice. Jo Sua was treating the customer's gabjil as if it were her fault. If he'd been that age, he wouldn't have eaten it; he'd have shrugged out a so what? and been done. Youth really was something to envy. He wasn't old, exactly, but he couldn't barrel ahead the way he had at twenty. He had to make a living.
"Yes. Thank you, Manager."
"All right, then let's get back to work. Today's lucky. We already paid the bad luck off up front. Highest sales of the month—let's go!"
"Yes!"
Eleven at night. Close the shop, finish the cleaning and the inventory, and this was the hour you landed on. The only stretch of the day that was his to spend as he liked. No matter how late he pushed it, he had to be asleep by three, so his freedom amounted to three hours, maybe four. Even that, he was glad of.
With a hiss he cracked a can of beer, and in the same motion flicked the computer on with his big toe. He settled his back against the chair and took the mouse. The thing he double-clicked was the shortcut for KoreaTV.
KoreaTV was the country's personal-media platform, its livestreaming site, its social network—the thing people meant when they said internet broadcast.
"Let's see..."
Kim Taeyoung rolled the mouse wheel with an easy, practiced hand. On the KoreaTV homepage, BJ broadcast thumbnails were tiled five across, sorted by category.
What was worth watching today? He liked plenty of broadcasters, but there was no one he could call himself a fan of. In the language of the broadcasts, he was a floating viewer.
"Tsk. Nothing but Excel Broadcasts again today."
The Excel Broadcast was a format that had sprung up like weeds across KoreaTV. A major male BJ hosted and ran the show, and a crowd of female BJs gathered as crew, as employees, for one big collab. Donate Moon Balloons and a song played on its own; the female BJ whose name had been called came out and danced.
What marked it was the ranking. The women were ordered by the money donated to them, and that ranking sat on one side of the screen like a spreadsheet. That was where the name came from.
Kim Taeyoung didn't like Excel Broadcasts. At first he had. You could watch a lot of female BJs in a single stream and enjoy the reactions, too. Then he realized a man without money was nothing but one viewer among ten thousand, and he came to hate them.
In a solo broadcast, you could still talk even if you spent nothing, or spent very little. Chat hard. Say the things the BJ liked to hear. That was enough. In an Excel Broadcast, if you didn't spend in chunks of at least fifty thousand won, you couldn't get a single word in.
"Nothing but small fry."
The only BJs not doing Excel Broadcasts, the reigning trend on KoreaTV these days, were the small fry the Excel shows wouldn't call. Either that, or they were already so big they had no need of one.
Kim Taeyoung rarely went into the big rooms. The reason was the same one that had made him sick of Excel Broadcasts.
"You're the one tonight."
After a long scroll, one female BJ caught his eye.
A reasonably pretty female cam, and a reasonable number of viewers. Just the right broadcast. Not so frantic that chatting on your own wore you out, and you could still get a little back-and-forth. The long, straight hair didn't hurt either.
He clicked the thumbnail and dropped straight into the stream. He had the ad-skip item they called Quick View, so no advertisement came up.
"NextLifeLandlord oppa. Welcome iiin~."
Next Life Landlord was Kim Taeyoung's ID. Small fry that she was, Joang smiled and greeted even a Quick View dry cracker who hadn't joined her fan club. He felt a small satisfaction in that.
Where else was a thirty-year-old junior-college service worker going to be welcomed by a pretty woman like this? If a place like that existed, it was the kind that made you pay a brutal fee up front.
"Hii, hii!"
"The shoulder dance? Like this? I'm twenty-six."
"Kyaa! Drain oppa! Thank youuu for the hundred and one. You wanted to hear this song, huh?"
A trendy beat spilled into the room.
I like to Gucci, Gucci, I like to party, yeah
Joang danced to the beat. Hot pants cut so high the swell of her backside showed, and a top that laid the valley of her chest bare. The soft sway of her was mesmerizing.
Kim Taeyoung enjoyed Joang's reaction. Watching a BJ react to money somebody else had spent was one of the pleasures of KoreaTV.
His chat had been ignored. A BJ streamed to make money. Of course she would turn her attention to the hot-blood fan who had paid, rather than to the chat of a dry cracker who hadn't donated a thing.
"Drain oppa! I danced well, right? If you want to see it again, spin the roulette this time?"
Ah, damn it. This room's chat is brutal.
There was no gap to wedge himself into. He typed as hard as he could and still couldn't get through to the BJ. Pull aggro and a ban was obvious.
"Tsk."
Kim Taeyoung clicked his tongue, light and short. He was supposed to be saving this month. Ten thousand won or so would be fine, wouldn't it?
He sent the message along with the hundred Moon Balloons. A roulette wheel popped up on the broadcast and started to spin. Joang, who hadn't spared him so much as a glance, finally broke into a bright smile and gifted him her attention.
"Landlord oppa! Thanks for the fan join, nice-chu! Chu! Chu! Love you!"
Get ready, and fire—
smack, smack, a slap across the ear, ah
Joang gave a light little greeting and rose from her seat. A faster beat than before was already pumping through the stream. She danced. Bare skin swayed, and it caught Kim Taeyoung's eyes and held them.
He watched harder than he had the last time. This was a ten-thousand-won reaction. He had to see all of it, without so much as a blink.
"Whoa, fashion! That's cool! Landlord oppa. I bet you dress so well."
The power of a hundred Moon Balloons was unmistakable. Joang answered every one of his chats. Kim Taeyoung enjoyed the back-and-forth and sipped his beer.
But the conversation couldn't last.
"Kyaaaa! Buffalo oppa! Why are you only showing up nooow? Do you know how long I've been waiting?"
The open-handed buffalo had appeared. A whale who tossed out a thousand balloons, or ten thousand, without a second thought.
Damn it. Conversation in this room is over. A whale big enough to fire his signature balloon burst as a hello had walked in the moment he arrived. Joang's attention had nowhere to go but onto him.
"Ha..."
Had he been at it for about forty minutes, talking with her? Ten thousand won for forty minutes. Far too expensive. A shame. He'd spent the money and hadn't even gotten to enjoy himself properly.
"Ah, fuck."
He threw the empty beer can at the trash. No sound came back. Hit the wall, hit the floor, drop into the bin—something should have made a noise.
"Wh-what the—fuck!"
Kim Taeyoung turned toward the wrongness of it and startled so hard he fell out of his chair. Inside his studio apartment, something enormous hung in the air. A black hole. Or a thing that looked like a black portal.