I fell asleep holding him in my arms, listening to him breathe. By the time I woke up, he was also beginning to stir. We both turned to face each other and looked into each other’s eyes. I asked:

—Hyung, how did you know I was on “this side”?

—That was obvious the moment I laid eyes on you.

—Did you know we’d end up like this?

—Yes, from that first moment.

Who knew where this confidence came from? I was repulsed by this implied self-hating-gay dynamic, that he was the most masculine and attractive person on Earth and I was just some obviously gay super uber GAY GAY GAY in comparison, but I couldn’t stop myself from falling headlong in love with him. To understand him, and beyond that, to understand my own thoughts and feelings as I crashed into him, and to interpret that whole mess of contradictions, I listened to every word he said, observed every little thing he did, and recorded it all. Desperately and plaintively, just like a grad student spending years writing their dissertation.

◊

That summer, I was totally obsessed. Obsessed and possessed.

He would invariably call after midnight, and I would leave Umma sleeping in her hospital room as I took a taxi to his place. The side effects from the Lasik surgery I’d had made the lights from the five hundred-odd streetlamps along Olympic Boulevard bleed into one another as the taxi zipped by, and the whole world looked like the inside of a dream. I paid the cab fare, about 15,000 won, got out, knocked on the steel gate of his building until I made the rusted hinges rattle, and finally there he was, a whole four inches taller than me, opening the door and emerging from the gate.

—You’re here.

A shy voice. In the dim light his eyes were sunken and his lips protruded, so unbearably cute that even before I stepped through his front door I touched and stroked his face (he hated when I did that).

That night, we ordered spicy chicken feet and soju. We’d almost polished off three bottles of soju when he lay down with my leg as a pillow (unlike him, I was still a few shots short of the red-faced stage of drunkenness). He began to lay out his life history: He was born into a rich family in the Apgujeong neighborhood, but his father couldn’t stand his alcoholic mother and deserted them early, while his older sister was married young to a Korean American and was now living in Virginia. He had lived with just his mother since university, until he put her in a hospital and moved out. The back of his head and neck grew warmer and warmer against my leg as he talked. I had a lot to talk about as well, being the caretaker of my sick mother and all. We both concluded that it was harder to handle their growing meanness and violence as they aged, and their extreme moods that seemed to shift by the second. He had been chattering on and on but suddenly fell silent; I looked down and found him asleep. What was he, a Kongsuni doll that went to sleep wherever you laid it down? His body spasmed a few times and he murmured, “Umma.” A tear ran from one eye. Well, this is a bit dramatic, I thought; it was kind of funny that a grown man about to enter middle age was crying for his mother in his sleep. I stroked his head.