YN by Esther Yi

Author:Esther Yi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astra Publishing House

7. Moonchildren on Earth

ONE AFTERNOON, AS I WAS about to leave my apartment to meet O, I turned off the lights and took one last look around the room. I was struck by the crisp image framed by my window, namely of office workers taking a smoke break down below on the sunlit plaza. I had the strange feeling that I could not look out the window, that I could only look at it. The view had the flatness of a computerized reproduction.

A figure broke off from the group of smokers and drifted onto the street. It was O, hands shoved into her pockets and cigarette dangling from her lips. She had binoculars hanging around her neck. She wanted to help me find Moon.

We first took a walk along the main street in my neighborhood, where men in dirty work overalls crouched in front of their auto shops and gazed across the street at stylish young couples migrating from café to café in jeans with deliberate holes. We passed my favorite of the workers, a middle-aged man who always sat with his colleagues in the back of a pickup truck parked in front of their auto shop. His brown hair possessed incredible volume, like hundreds of little lives reaching for the sky. The hair seemed to have been lowered onto his head from above like a crown, and he never smiled, grimly acquiescent to this touch of beauty. We also passed the limping woman, who now regularly accosted me, despite my demurrals. But today she didn’t even glance my way, presumably because I wasn’t alone. I told O about her.

“Of course,” O said. “They find people like you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You’ve got permanent bags under your eyes,” she said. “You look like you haven’t slept since you were born. But the rest of your face is as fresh as a baby’s. That woman thinks you’ve been waiting your whole life to believe in something, and she’s ready to tell you what it should be.”

We headed for the waterfront where Seongsu-dong was hemmed in from the south by the Han River. I led O to a vast concrete platform that sloped down into the water. Most evenings, I lay on my back on this platform as the sun set, thinking about how Moon must be somewhere to the east, west, north, or south of me.

For a few minutes, O and I couldn’t hold a conversation because we were hyperventilating, taking advantage of the fact that it was one of those rare days when the city’s air quality, according to our phones, was “good” instead of “hazardous.” Still, I refused to switch on the air purifier in my apartment. I couldn’t imagine how such a machine might work without spewing incredible toxins of its own, and I resented this extravagantly roundabout way of being killed.

“Wouldn’t it be better to put thousands of air purifiers out on the street and turn them on all at once?” I said. “It’s pointless to live inside a room of good air if that room is inside a world of bad air.

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