Now We Are (1)
The sky at seven in the morning was sullen.
Dry thunder had been cracking since dawn, wrecking any chance of sleep, and now storm clouds like smoke were clotting together, slow and heavy. They swallowed the reddish sun in the east and sheeted the whole sky gray.
Some weather. Of all days, today.
"Recording's today, right? You get any prep done?"
My brother's easy voice came through the phone, and a groan slipped out of me on its own.
"Prep? What prep. I've got absolutely nothing. I think the production team's lost their minds. We roll in an hour and I still don't know what we're doing. Real variety or not, this feels like marching into a war with nothing but the clothes on my back."
The broad strokes would be ready on their end, so we weren't about to dive headfirst into bare dirt—but I'd been sure they'd give us some warning. Neptune was still a variety rookie, and I was a complete civilian. And yet there was truly nothing.
"The kids went berserk when they heard you were going on. It's a show they watch every single Saturday. Broadcast day's about to outrank field-trip day. (Uncle! Let me have it too, Dad! Me too! I said it first!) You hear that?"
I could see it clear as day: the quadruplets plastered against my brother, lunging for the phone. Full of energy, for this early. After a fight that drew blood, Gyeoul seized the phone and shouted, thrilled.
"Uncle! Uncle, are you becoming a celebrity? Are you gonna be on TV all the time now?"
"No."
"Then will you be on a lot? Like last time, over and over? We're inviting friends over to watch with us on the day you air! Mom said she'd order chicken and pizza! Grandma and Grandpa said they're going to the village hall to watch too······!"
Good God.
Whatever last time had been—the kind of thing that makes you want to die of shame—I was avoiding it. Absolutely. No exceptions.
"Oppa! We're all ready to roll!"
Lim Seoyoung's voice came from behind, wound tight with fighting spirit. Makeup touch-ups finished, the kids were poking their heads out the van window. I climbed into the driver's seat and said goodbye to the quadruplets.
"Uncle's off to work."
"So cool! Fighting, Uncle! If there's a game or something, you have to win!"
"The quadruplets?"
Maybe she'd caught that soul-deep shout—Lee Songha leaned out from the back seat and asked. A second later my eardrum nearly split. I yanked the phone from my ear, and the kids' voices rang through the van.
"Uncle, who is it? Who? (Why, why! What! What is it!) Who said the quadruplets? A girl's voice! (It's Neptune, I bet! So lucky! Me too! I wanna hear their voices too) Uncle, tell them we promoted the new song like crazy at school!"
Pandemonium. Behind me the kids and the stylists burst out laughing.
I was about to hang up when Lee Songha reached out with unusual eagerness.
"Oppa. Can I talk to them?"
"Yeah? Sure. Here. Watch your eardrums."
I handed over the phone, and they swarmed it like pigeons on a crust, each getting a word in. I let them, figuring it might loosen the mood before the shoot. After getting carved to pieces in the edit on that group talk show with Simon Lee, the whole lot seemed to have come down with a variety-show phobia.
By the time the phone had made a full round and we hung up, nearly five minutes had passed.
"Do they look like you, Oppa?"
Lee Songha asked, pressed flat against the back of the driver's seat.
"Hard to say. Personality, definitely not. The face, a little? Two of the four look a lot like I did in elementary school."
"I want to see. Miniature Oppas."
She murmured it with a perfectly straight face. I was about to say it wasn't quite that when a text came in. Setup was done; come into the parking lot. I turned the key and spoke.
"They're filming us stepping out when the doors open. The camera starts on the legs of whoever gets out first and tilts up. Who wants to go first?"
"Then the person with the prettiest legs should get out first!"
"So rock-paper-scissors. Everybody but Lim Seoyoung."
"What about me! Why me! I'm fine too, you know!"
In the end, it was decided Lee Songha would get out first.
I pulled into the rear lot at PBS and found a cameraman on a heavy rig, the lighting crew, and VJs with compact cameras on their shoulders, all waiting.
The entrance shot done, the cameras closed in. A VJ in an olive field jacket backed up ahead of us as he talked.
"Straight up to Variety on the sixth floor. The regular cast is already here, waiting on the guests."
It was before office hours, and the inside of the station was bleak. The few staff we glimpsed looked hollow-eyed from all-nighters and scrambled to hide the moment they saw a camera. Thunder growled in through the window cracks, and it felt less like a network than a zombie den we'd broken into.
We took an empty elevator to the sixth floor. Lim Seoyoung, checking her face in the wall mirror, suddenly tapped my shoulder.
"Oppa, listen."
"I'm listening."
"Why am I not nervous when I think about recording with you? Other shoots, I could feel my insides shriveling, but today it's more like—bring it on. Like I showed up with luck on my back. Right?"
The others nodded along. Mm. My shoulders felt a little heavier.
The place the VJ led us to was a large conference room. The moment we opened the door, the noisy chatter died at a stroke. Familiar faces, seated here and there, craned their necks our way.
Veterans, five years running, of the real variety that owned Saturday evenings—Now We Are. The second we greeted them together, five men shot to their feet.
"Oh, Neptune! Yeah, yeah, I know you—come in! What are you doing, clear the good seats!"
"The guests are a girl group? Oh, come on! If you're pulling this, give us a heads-up!"
"A heads-up for what, so you can swing by a salon? Scrub a squid all you want, it's still a squid."
"Score—I did go to the salon. No wonder I felt like going today."
They had to have known, more or less, who the guests were, and yet the surprise and delight played uncannily natural. Of course every bit of it was being drunk in by the cameras stationed in every corner of the room.
While the Neptune kids fielded the flood of questions and attention, I stood there like a male ballad singer shipped in to entertain the troops. Only after the mood eased a notch did one of them acknowledge me.
"You're the manager from the Lunar New Year special, right?"
"Yes. Jung Sunwoo."
A profile clicked into place. Hwang Jaehyun. Came up a singer; the resident punching-bag big brother.
"I'm doing a cable show with Taepyeong-hyung, and he would not shut up about the Lunar New Year special hitting number one. So I watched it, and it was fun. Take care of us today. Our ratings keep sliding, so we've got to borrow a little heat off the guests."
"Ah, please take care of me too. But what exactly are we doing today?"
I seized the opening, and Hwang Jaehyun answered as if it were nothing.
"They didn't tell you anything?"
"Just the date, the time, and the place. Nobody said to prepare a thing, so we showed up with nothing but ourselves."
"Nothing but yourselves is plenty. This is a show where we put the body to work."
Fair enough. Before coming I'd binged the recent episodes as homework. On paper the concept was the cast trying something new every week and showing it off; in practice the concept changed every episode, and every episode they ran.
"We barely know anything either. Seems like a bit that needs real reactions? Know it going in and it looks staged, so sometimes they deliberately don't tell you."
Real reactions. The fog only got thicker.
"Still, don't worry. Once we roll, the directors stick to you and call every move. They're not going to make you do something you can't, right?"
Hwang Jaehyun said it, grinning.
"Oh, and you're here to push the new song, yeah? If you brought albums, give me one. I'll play it in the car when we move later."
Of course I'd brought them. By the box.
I said I'd hand one over in a bit and cut a glance at the Neptune kids. Buried among the Now We Are cast, and the air around them wasn't awkward—it was easy. Lim Seoyoung was chattering away, carrying the bright mood forward.
That was when a woman who looked like production staff stepped in.
"Bringing in the next guests!"
So there were more guests. The thought had barely landed before the room got loud.
"What, more guests today? Don't tell me another girl group?"
"Actors this time. Two of them."
"If they're actresses, I'm not clocking out today! Two days straight, no sleep, like the old days!"
"Seconded! I'll surrender that miserable clock-out!"
Their reactions were realer than mine.
Soon the door opened again, and the actors she'd mentioned came in.
Actors are actors.
Cheeks warm and soft as rice cakes fresh off the mallet, eyes so large they looked set in place, lips the color of roses. And short limbs that couldn't keep still. Child actors.
A girl, and a mixed-race boy—a pair younger even than the quadruplets at home. Even so, their résumés were probably long. I'd seen those faces plenty, in miniseries and daily dramas, and in films.
"Oppa, my gut just went off."
Lim Seoyoung whispered beside me.
"You don't think they cast you to look after those kids, do you?"
I was a little suspicious myself. Thanks to Star Manager, uncle to the quadruplets had stuck to me like a character bit.
But unlike the quadruplets, who still reeked of pure kid, these two felt entirely different. They didn't read as young enough to need someone looking after them.
The girl was beaming among the older men, playing cute, but the deliberate cuteness—the expressions and little moves built to be fawned over—showed straight through. The mixed-race boy wore the face of a little old man who found the entire world a chore.
The two child actors worked their greetings around the room, and when they reached me they tipped heads no bigger than a fist. They couldn't tell whether I was cast or not. I was just about to speak—
"All the guests are gathered, so we'll begin the main recording."
The woman who'd brought them in clapped to mark the start. Voices sank, eyes gathered, and she drew out a cue card.
"You must be wondering why we called you here first thing in the morning. Today we start with individual interviews in private rooms. When your name is called, please step into the room next door, in that order!"
"What? What is this? You're not handing out some weird mission again, are you?"
"Don't make the guests do anything weird!"
She didn't so much as blink, and called Hwang Jaehyun first. He disappeared wearing a bad feeling on his face, and two more soon left the conference room after him. No one came back. After the interview, maybe they were moved somewhere else.
"Jung Sunwoo!"
I was on my feet the moment my name landed. First from our side, and the Neptune kids waved like they were seeing someone off on a long road.
"Oppa! Let's all survive this and meet again!"
"If anything happens in the private room, scream."
"What am I, Shim Cheong being hauled off to the sea?"
I let out a short laugh and followed the woman.
The private room she led me into did not feel ordinary. Blackout curtains sealed the windows, and the light was an eerie purple. The kind of room that wanted a drift of dry ice across the floor.
Deeper in, two cameras, a PD, and a writer sat side by side.
The PD was Bae Junghwan, the main PD, a face I'd learned while rewatching the recent episodes. The bob-haired writer, city air coming off her in waves, was Song Yujin, the assistant writer who'd texted me.
I sat at a table draped in black cloth, and Writer Song smiled.
"In person, you land a little harder than you do on screen."
I returned the greeting with a sour face, and she went straight on.
"There's been a lot of talk lately that our show's fallen into a rut, so we're transfusing fresh blood through guests. Writer Park, who planned Star Manager, recommended you and Neptune."
"Ah. That person."
"I did say we should pull as much fun as that show did, but we're not actually expecting that much, so don't feel the weight. Pull it off every time and you'd have to quit managing and just do television. Just be natural with the Neptune members."
"Right. But······ natural doing what?"
Being called in one by one like this, it did seem—just as someone had said—like they were handing out a mission. Or maybe it was a hidden-camera bit.
Still, if I was going to be on, better something I could actually do well. Screen time to protect, and the new song to push, the way we'd planned.
"Then first, I'll let you in on a secret."
PD Bae said it, face gone serious.
"The truth is, there are people in this world with special powers."
"······Special powers?"
"Superpowers, you'd call them."
I nearly pulled a grotesque expression in front of the camera.
PD Bae whipped the black cloth off the table. Several cards came into view, printed with large letters.
"Go on. Pick one."
He pointed at the cards as he said it.
There were several. Only one of them reached my eyes.