When he opened his eyes, they were filled with rain. 

As if awakening from a deep sleep, he kept blinking until his vision cleared, until he was startled by a boundless green. All around him, wild grasses swept into slopes that clipped jaggedly against the sky like walls of a fortress. The boy who called himself Wool was at the very center of what appeared to be and what he belatedly recognized as a crater.  

A white-bellied creature flew above, unbothered by the weather. As Wool watched it soar, he caught sight of a figure in the distance who was climbing the crater’s walls with astonishing ease. As if on cue, they turned abruptly around, and relief struck Wool with such intensity that he rose to his feet. They were bare, and he resisted the urge to grimace. 

From a new height, the walls loomed higher than they had before. He wanted to lay back down, to reawaken when the rain stopped and he felt like himself again. But the climber kept waving in his direction as if to say, “Come on, you can do it!” and so Wool went. 

For whatever distance he crossed, the climber completed double the amount. The rain had since eased into a drizzle, but the rocks were still slippery, coating his hands and bare feet with smears of black. The wind was no more merciful, surging severely around him before silencing all at once, as if carrying some sacred truth that swerved out of awareness if he dared too close.

The peaks of the ridges were beginning to expand and Wool had yet to look down. For a moment, just a moment, he considered it, but pain shot suddenly through his fingers. This sensation, so unexpected yet familiar, jolted his body backwards and nausea rushed into his throat. As light flooded his vision, he felt with absolute clarity that he was about to fall. 

Clouds hardened into rock and rock softened into clouds—the world was in dreadful disarray. Gray skies grew muddier and muddier, materializing into the dark ceiling of his bedroom in Seoul. Reduced to a mere spectator, Wool watched as a bandaged arm flailed out, pressing a cigarette against a container filled with piss-yellow water and drowned buds. His alarm, blaring red, was shouting at him to wake up, wake up, wake up, wa ke u p, wa k e—

“We’re almost there,” a voice spoke softly, and everything stopped spinning. When Wool reopened his eyes, the climber was right above him. A boy his age with a handsome face (though mostly obscured by a baseball cap). He wore a brightly colored jacket and had his hand outstretched, ready to help Wool up and continue their ascent together. 

Receiving the offered hand, Wool closed the distance between them. As he did, the sea opened up in a brilliant expanse of teal and turquoise. “Look at how high up we are! Don’t you feel like you could just jump off?!” the boy shouted, peering excitedly over the edge.

As Wool stood there, clinging to the precipice, he thought about what if. It was less the allure of the ocean and more of the free-fall, the suspense at the middle where it no longer mattered which way he went. What if, he thought, what if. What if . . . what if . . .

He was staying with a family friend that summer, a senior diver who lived in a house that smelled perpetually of fish and brine. The odor no longer bothered him and he wished half-heartedly that it did. His time in Jejudo these days was uneventful. If not indoors, he caught rides on motorboats or loitered around diving sites with crabs for company. 

Mrs. Choi was regularly away, involved with community matters and visiting her children who lived inland. She dove less and less these days. There wasn’t much Wool had to say about her other than she woke invariably at sunrise and kept things exceptionally tidy.

Of their relation, he felt that his presence was more disposable than any of Mrs. Choi’s worn-out equipment. To be fair, things had been rather fascinating when he first arrived. Like all the tourists, he saw Mrs. Choi and the other haenyeo slip in and out of their wetsuits like they were seal skin. The beaches had also been refreshing, stabilizing, but now he was content to simply listen to the waves from his room. 

One afternoon he’d been laying on the sofa and staring at an aquarium that Mrs. Choi hardly gave any notice. Inside were colorful guppies swimming around. Just as listless, Wool watched them glide under arches and over pebbles that glowed dull in comparison. The more he observed the creatures, the more it seemed that they were unsure what to do with themselves. Bending over the sofa, he knocked on the glass. Once, twice. None of the fish reacted. He paused before knocking a third and final time, seeking entry. 

At the third knock, Wool wondered if he was more like the fish or the tank itself. And didn’t the latter hold some semblance of truth, as childish as it sounded? Had his body not degraded into a vessel that needed to be filled, inhabited by life that wasn’t his meek own? 

Sometimes Mang (the climber) kept him company. They rarely did more than sift through the late Mr. Choi’s bookshelves and collection of old records. While he didn’t dislike reading, Mang was too excitable to commit to books that didn’t feature drawn action scenes. 

As for himself, Wool was almost finished with Night on the Galactic Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa. By the looks of it, the previous reader had stopped only pages before Giovanni and Campanella happened aboard the steam train. A shame, since the novel was surprisingly enjoyable and Wool had just read the scene where all the passengers departed at Southern Cross. Heaven. 

Compared to Seoul, the stars above Jeju shone like they were within an arm’s reach. Though Wool was far from a religious person, he sometimes and seriously imagined all the places Heaven could be. There was Miyazawa’s station, clustered in the cosmos. The Asphodel Meadows, where it was neither warm nor cold, sad or joyful, a place more indifferent than earth.  Or perhaps, and most likely, Heaven was a door at the end of a hallway that was more welcoming than lonesome. Could such a place exist? Would it make any difference if it did?

“A long time ago, there lived a scorpion that ate other bugs by using its tail to catch them. One day, he found himself cornered by a weasel. Fearing for his life, he ran but could not escape it. Suddenly, he fell into a well and, unable to climb out, began to drown. He started to pray then, saying: ‘Oh God. How many lives have I stolen to survive? Yet when it came my turn, I selfishly ran away. And for what? What a waste my life has been! If only I’d let the weasel eat me, I could have helped him live another day. God, please hear my prayer. Even if my life has been meaningless, let my death be of help to others. Burn my body so that it may become a beacon, to light the way for others as they search for true happiness.’” 

Was it possible to attain happiness without sacrifice? Was it possible to escape one's unhappy world if that world survived by sustaining the very misery that made it unbearable?

The sky was being stretched to new and impossibly conceived limits until it tore down the center, creating a milky white expanse with edges like a mangled flesh wound. Into that oblivion both the sea and sky itself disappeared, leaving not a single star behind. 

Wool groped out to his sides blindly, deafly, but no one was there. 

“Coach must’ve lost his shit . . . How did that even happen? Don’t tell me you ‘fell’ again.” 

“. . .  You know how bullying is these days.” 

“Seriously? They must have been crazy . . . No wait, you’re lying!” 

When Wool opened his eyes, his vision was startlingly clear. He was propped up against a tree. His mouth was dry and his lips tasted like sea salt. There was no sea anywhere in sight. 

What was in front of him was virtually indescribable. As in, there was very little to even describe. The ground was flat, bereft of plants save for clusters of trees that curled and cradled each other as though cowering from themselves. These trees were completely white, giving the impression of having been cut from paper. Though they retained the ordinary tree’s height and thickness, they seemed easy to taint, to rip to shreds by imagination alone. 

As Wool wandered through this wasteland, he noticed there were no leaves to be crushed, no wind rustling through grass. Even his own breathing was muffled. He might have walked for four minutes or two hours, crossed three kilometers or five feet. With no way to gauge time or distance, he felt that he was in no-man’s-land, a purgatorial state with no end and no beginning. 

His feet were beginning to ache when he caught something in his periphery. To his far left, behind two embracing trees, there emerged a sort of procession of shadows. For a while, these shadows remained shadows—amorphous and distant, phasing in and out of perspective. But just as how you can repeat a word until it loses its meaning, or stare at splatters of blood before discerning unique patterns, some shadows lost their saturation while others began to take form. 

He saw a girl who drew with these special dip pens, always on their school’s bleachers listening to Trot. She had introduced him to all of his now favorite songs. He saw a nervous man who worked at his father’s firm, fired when he came to work drunk. At a Christmas party the year before, he had performed Liszt. Wool remembers how his posture (everyone called him hunchback man) appeared natural on the piano, how he seemed finally to settle into himself. There were various others Wool perhaps wished to see but was unable to. 

He just stood there, trembling from head to toe. He could not think. He was incapable of holding or forming a single thought. But somehow, he began walking. Or maybe the ground was moving. Either way, the shadows were disappearing and he could hardly hear a thing. Hence why a faint whoosh caught his attention. It happened once and then again. And again.

He was headed in the direction of a lone tree when it struck him: the whoosh was not, in fact, distantly ahead, but emitting above him. Halting to a stop he looked up, his chest tightening with the realization that there was indeed something there. This something had a triangular tip, another slightly below, and the image of a kite came gradually to mind. The instant that idea settled, like peering into a rippling reflection, the kite (and it was a kite) entered fully into view. Its tail brushed against Wool’s ankle and he felt that he was going to be sick. 

It was a terribly hot day, simmering with the kind of heat that was as likely to lure madness out of minds as it was to instill it. Most people were working at this hour and the streets were quiet. 

Setting a bowl aside, Wool raised his fingers in front of him, curling them in and out. Prior to shooting practice yesterday, he and his teammates were instructed to hold blocks of ice. Coach wanted them to become accustomed to numbness, to train in every condition. One extremity to the next, yet it felt like switching between channels of dreams, that he was never truly present nor awake. Maybe he’d just stick his hands into a fire. No more archery. No more ice. More pain. 

Stepping off his parents’ porch, he was assaulted immediately by light. It was a cloudless day in July and the sun was glaring onto the earth. Naturally, Wool’s eyes focused on something red and black drifting through the open sky. It turned out to be a rectangular kite, the kind tethered by a string and spoke wheel. This one, however, was loose and flying in the direction of a station. Without a single thought, Wool flung open the gate and ran. 

Looking back, he was unable to make sense of the impulse that had consumed him. It was unlike any sensation he’d ever experienced. Not even his dormant competition adrenaline came close. Sure, Wool had always enjoyed kite-flying, especially around Seollal, but that random affinity shouldn’t have ignited a life-or-death compulsion to spring after a mere toy as if the world would burst into flames if it left his sight. What would become of him if this free-flying kite ended up strangled in some telephone pole, reduced to a pitiful spectacle and discarded as trash? Or maybe left there for amusement? “Purpose” may be the word, but that felt wrong.

His search led him to an older neighborhood. Rooftops were visibly weathered and rusted bikes supported themselves on brick walls. Locating his target a block away, Wool started to break into a sprint, his eyes glued on the sky, but pain shot suddenly through his shoulder and he stumbled back. It took him a shamefully long moment to realize he’d collided with someone. 

“Fuck!” the person exclaimed. (Again, Wool processed this belatedly).

It took another second for the stranger to actualize in his vision, but Wool’s reflexes still functioned apparently and were forcing him into a bow. In this grueling heat, an older man was wearing a white suit (the disposable kind), a mask, gloves, and plastic shoe covers. He was holding what appeared to be waste until Wool realized they were valuables in fine condition: books, paper goods, lacquerware. His obliviousness at this moment later haunted him, but the opening of a car door jolted him to reality and he stepped aside, mumbling an apology. Fortunately, the man just laughed and gave a pat to his shoulder.

That should’ve been Wool’s cue to leave, to return to his kite-chase, but curiosity won over as it always did. Moving to a half patch of shade, he observed as the man went in and out of a small house, loading boxes and bags into a van. Two other men worked with him. 

From underneath the shade, he started wondering what could be the matter when wind, all humid and dusty, unexpectedly picked up. Something began tickling his leg and the sensation grew more and more irritable until he gave up and glanced down. To his amazement and vague horror, a kite (not the one he labored after) was stuck with its nose in the ground, ribbons fluttering against his skin. It was exactly the kind that children flew—colorful with long, whimsical tails that had minds of their own. But these tails were faded and its body gray. Left to rot, basically. In hindsight, the encounter felt like an omen. 

“Excuse me, did you know her?” 

Wool turned around, coming face to face with a girl roughly his age. She had dark eyes and a neat appearance. Unsure how to respond, he nodded dumbly.

“Is that so?” the girl remarked after a pause. She frowned. “I haven’t seen you around before.” 

“I was just—” 

“—But that’s the thing. We don’t see people. We don’t care to look in the first place. I bet it’d been over a week and if the Byuns hadn’t noticed the smell in this heat . . . what then?”

Wool didn’t answer. The kite tails still fluttered against his skin. 

“Didn’t know her myself and was told to mind my own business. That this sort of thing happens all the time and shouldn’t stir any bad commotion. That’s what Grandma says and she herself has one foot in the—sorry. I just . . . I got curious. Do you think that’s wrong?”

Who was he to say anything? Something like guilt was churning in his stomach but he managed a verbal ‘no.’ He might also have added something else because the girl nodded solemnly. 

“Take care,” she said, and her hard expression softened into a smile. Only when she left did Wool discover that he’d been digging nails into his palms, drawing blood. He sighed. 

Some minutes later he was stumbling to the end of the street, the sun bearing oppressively down on him. His hands burned. His wrist throbbed. The images of the flying and fallen kites flashed alternately in his mind, like puzzle pieces meant to fit together. But they didn’t, they didn’t fit, and nothing made sense. Pressing an arm against a wall, he vomited.

“I assume this is different from your previous jobs?” 

“Not exactly. I did similar services before transferring to Busan.” 

“I see. And how do you feel right now?” 

“Is something showing on my face? I’m alright, I guess. Ever since we entered I kept thinking about how tidy things are. Sterile. Others were in pure negligence but not this one.”

“That’s right. No signs of addiction either. Like nothing was wrong.”

“. . . You think so? The emptiness was like sounding an alarm to me. Actually, I keep remembering this one married couple. House looked the same as this until we located the bedroom. Seems like they had an agreement. Before that I used to think that all of this could’ve been prevented if there was someone else around. But I was wrong, it shattered my idea, and I began wondering, what can you really do? We aren’t responsible for the condition of man.” 

“That’s right.” 

“Mm. But still . . . still I think that silence can last forever on its own. Silence shared—that’s something you can feel. It doesn’t numb like the former. No, it itches and itches until you begin to burn. I just hope that feeling, that madness, is enough for some to want or even hope to start something new.”

The fallen kite was now hovering above him, as solidified as anything in the chasms between memory and reality were (which was to say not at all). Its tail, so long that it coiled on the ground, bore resemblance to a stretched-out neck, the body itself a human head. 

“Why archery if you don’t mind me asking?” 

“No particular reason. I suppose it’s what my parents wanted.” 

“Hm . . . don’t you think we’re kinda similar?”

Wool stood his ground, experiencing something like fearful nostalgia. Not quite fear, but the whispers of. But as the kite did nothing, he chanced a step forward. It followed, its top rotating to his right. Tentatively, he took a step in that direction, noticing how it moved with him. He paused, then stepped left. As the kite again pointed right, he felt that he understood. 

“What do you mean by similar?” 

“To be honest, I’m not sure. I just said it on impulse. But there’s you, an athlete. And I, an artist. We both need equal doses of audacity and self-restraint, no? That’s the impression you gave me anyways. Still do. It can be hard to balance but one day you just . . . fall in love with it.”

For better or for worse, that feeling never came. Now, it would never come. To him, archery was an operation that left no room for error. From drawing and releasing the bow string, to the thud of arrows plowing mercilessly into their targets—purely scientific. Two plus two equals four and things could not be otherwise. A twitch, a millisecond, the conception of a single stray thought—that made all the difference. It came to where just entering shooting ranges made him feel as if he were trapped inside Kafka’s Penal Colony, that he was as likely to harm himself on cotton wool as his carbon-fire arrows. 

With the kite acting as his compass, Wool arrived at a grove of trees. Unlike all the ones before (a blank canvas) these were splattered with reds and oranges and blues, like someone had gone around swinging buckets of dye. Upon closer inspection, arrows were lodged into their sides. Where they came into contact, the trees bled a colorful, paint-like sap. The sight of their wounds was eerily beautiful. Wool curled his hands around the shaft of one arrow, giving it a little tug. 

Cold. It was terribly cold. He tugged a blanket tighter around his shoulders. Inside was warm but there was no place for him there. Everything watched. Nothing was still nor silent. Nothing was safe. Wrapping a hand around his throat, Wool tried to mediate his breathing. 

In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . . the monotonous song of arrows assaulted his mind. He could hear them whistling as someone strode into position. As Wool peered out into the darkness, a strong silhouette stood before him, unbothered by the cold. Always a step ahead, a flight above.

Mang’s hand was pressed against his chin, a taut bowstring kissing his lips. Draw - Aim - Release. A perfect shot—one could tell by the resonance. 

Slowly, he turned around. Wool stared back, lifting his gaze from the other’s strong chin to his full lips, and to his . . . eyes. Where were they? The air was now freezing and Mang’s lips began moving. Whatever he said tried to emit from Wool’s own mouth. 

“Ungrateful child. How much more will you think?”

“Traitorous being. You have been your own ruin.” 

“Dying soul, when will you rise?”

Finally, it twisted loose. His wrist burned with pain. Wool dropped the arrow, every inch of his body screaming for rest. Clutching his hand, he sank to the ground. But it must be done, he must declare it, and mustering the strength to dig a hole, he buried the arrow inside. 

Packets of rice soared into the sea, disappearing soundlessly beneath the surface. What a waste, Wool thought. He was standing on a cliffside, watching Mrs. Choi and her granddaughters cross a basalt expanse below. There were other women in puffer vests, morning mist enshrouding them all. Maybe his own mom was there. 

The thought took him aback. He had a mother. Who missed him, maybe. Whom he missed, maybe. But he did miss her. And she did miss him. He meant something to someone and thus had a role to fulfill. For some reason this had all slipped his mind. From so high above, it seemed he’d begun to believe himself the very deity the haenyeo made offerings to, that he was as far removed from human affairs as his silly ego believed. But as he reached into his pocket, he realized he had nothing to offer besides loose threads and a lighter that was out of fuel. 

What a funny thing, faith was. But to practice faith and simply have faith were two entirely different matters, he surmised. Though as much as he tried, he understood neither. It was with this conviction that he caught sight of something on the horizon. 

When he opened his eyes, they were filled with rain. 

“You’re crying.” 

He was standing on a shore. It was pitch black. Cold water lapped at his bare feet. He wished to walk to where the sea froze into glass and nothing could reach him any longer. 

This boy, Jung Jiwon, who called himself Wool, began to laugh. His face was dry and to shed a tear would be yet another facade. “I hate you,” he responded to a shadow in the sea. 

“I don’t think you do.” 

Wool dug his feet deeper into sand. “It is I, myself, who am talking, and not you.” 

“Indeed,” the shadow said. “It is I who am talking. All of these ‘I, I, I’s,’ don’t you think? ‘Me, Miserable!’ Jung Jiwon, are you incapable of seeing beyond yourself?” 

“Yes.” 

“Liar. There are people you care about who need you in return.” 

He was tired, so very tired. “For me, who cannot even claim ‘nobody,’ let alone ‘I,’ those people you speak of can live properly once I’m gone. Now move.” 

“No. You don’t want me to. We do this so often that I imagine it feels like a cycle, that you’re just pushing that boulder up the hill, a state of being you no longer see the boundaries of once you’ve become a part of. ‘Move,’ you say, but you haven’t taken a single step. You’re still here.”

“I’ve damned myself then, is what you’re saying. Like a hamster on a fucking wheel.”

“If that’s what you think, you’re well off the wheel. Now you're just cleaning the walls of your cage, your little fish tank—clever, aren’t we? You’ve convinced yourself that you’re trapped in place, that it’s your own doing, but that’s not entirely true. As you yourself like to say, ‘We are forever in the process of becoming.’”

“And how much of that do you actually believe?” 

“Does it matter?” the shadow spoke simply. Their tone had softened. Stepping forward, they offered their hand. “Stick around and find out? You see, the sun is rising behind me. The whole of life is there, in knowing that the sun is, but wouldn’t you like to meet it?”

Rain was falling. A boy named Jung Jiwon was walking across the shore of a beach in Jejudo. He wore drenched clothes and a smile on his face. Beneath an old hanok roof, a Mrs. Choi was waiting for him, towel in one hand and a basket of fresh abalone in the other. 

There was a letter on his desk with a drawing inside, sent from a dear friend. There was a kite under his bed in Seoul chosen carefully by two parents, awaiting to be flown. 

Jiwon looked out at the sea. Rain was falling and the sun had risen.