Wide Eyes

Min-jung was an only child who often played alone in her preschool years, scrabbling in the lot of dirt and pebbles behind her house, which grew long strands of scraggly yellow weed around its edges and always dried quickly into dust after it rained. She made furrows in the soil with sticks or a toy rake, leaving hearts, stars and other symbols to her liking, taking pride in beautifying the face of that old patch of earth, if only temporarily.

Her mother did short shifts selling tickets in the evening at the makeshift bus station, which was destined never to gain official status in a place that would not grow anymore. Her father alternated his work throughout the year between their vegetable fields, winter greenhouses and the persimmon orchard, still working some of the same plots of land that his family had eighty years before. He’d lived in the village up until his military service began when he was eighteen, and after finishing three years of duty along the Demilitarized Zone to the north, he’d returned to start his own crops alongside those of his parents.

After their village finally became wired to the internet, Min-jung’s parents bought a computer. She was five years old at the time, and her mother warned her she wasn’t to touch the device without permission. Her father made space for the monitor and keyboard on an old desk that until then had held only a collection of yellowed newspapers and an unread bible, the latter having been passed down in the family for several decades, ever since missionaries had started the Catholic church on Main Street and departed for good. The computer brought the world into their home in a way the dusty old TV, which had access to only a few Korean channels, couldn’t. On the internet, no matter where you navigated, foreign faces found their way to the screen, usually in the form of advertisements. The world was very large, Min-jung came to understand, and exceedingly diverse.  

In the first grade she saw her first foreigner in the flesh, a blond woman whose name she didn’t know, but who came to the village on Fridays to teach English to the fourth, fifth and sixth grade students. Min-jung was too shy to pass her in the hallway and would duck into a classroom if the woman was walking toward her. Because of this she only ever saw the blond lady from a distance, but was struck by how different her features were. She was taller than most of the other teachers, the bridge of her nose was very pronounced, and it went high up on her face. After Min-jung saw Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, she decided the woman looked very much like a movie princess.

When she reached the fourth grade, a new foreigner had begun coming to the school. His name was Brian and he had sandy brown hair and green eyes. Years later that was all she would really remember about him: brown hair, green eyes. For all of the fourth grade she hardly understood a word of English, but would sit intently and stare at Brian’s eyes when he was speaking. They were beautiful and exotic, like precious stones. She wondered if everything he saw was tinted a little bit green, like being underwater in a clear river. Min-jung and everyone else had dark eyes. She began to check carefully in the mirror at home to see if there were any shards of color in her pupils when the light hit them the right way, but there was only the deep oaken brown she’d always known. That year, in the fourth grade, she asked her mother if it were possible to change her eye color when she got older.

“No,” her mother replied flatly, and the corners of her own eyes grew crow’s feet, as they tended to do in response to her daughter’s odd questions. “That would be unnatural.”

Min-jung felt disillusioned and wanted to hide from that agitated frown her mother gave her.

When she was in middle school she started reading issues of a fashion magazine she could buy at the 7-Eleven in the next town. She would go there with a few friends, and they would browse the flashy publications on the racks, but she was often the only one to make a purchase. The magazine was printed in Seoul and the girls were so stylish and pretty. They wore high heels and had dyed chestnut brown hair rather than black. On occasion some them would be blonde. They were the girls she heard the boys talking guardedly about in their huddled circles.

The articles were mainly about makeup and the latest fashions, but it wasn’t so much the articles she was interested in as she was the models in the advertisements. The first ad that caught her eye had been for a brand of perfume, but the face of the model, most certainly a Korean, was the only thing that captured her attention—the girl, beaming into the camera with the silhouette of a man behind her right shoulder, had bright blue eyes; they looked almost electric, as if there were lights shining inside them. This was what led Min-jung to discover colored contact lenses, which she ordered over the internet in defiance of her parents’ wishes, arguing that she was using her own allowance savings. She did this in February, so that she could wear them on the first day of high school in March.

She tried them on in the bathroom the night before classes began. She was nervous, and it took fifteen minutes for her to bring herself to slide the lenses correctly onto her eyeball. Once she did, they stung so much that she winced and one of them fell out. She removed the other one as well, shakily bringing a finger to her iris to pull it off, and told herself that it was late and her watering eyes were just tired. The eyeliner that she had put on for this momentous occasion ran down her cheeks in ashy rivulets.

The next day she went to school early, when only a few teachers at most would see her before she disappeared into the washrooms. There she took out her contact lens case, placed it on the old beige countertop, and unscrewed the tops of the right and left-hand capsules. She rinsed her hand and slowly inserted the lenses. Her eyes stung again, almost as badly as the night before, and the whites of each became shot through with spidery red veins. She blinked until her tears had lubricated the lenses and the sensitivity of her nerves had dulled. Her eyes wouldn’t stop watering, and she sat through a day of classes with a piece of toilet paper in hand to dab at the runoff below her bottom lids, while the boys looked on in amazement and the girls cooed and studied her. The foreign English teacher, a woman from England, did a double take on the first Friday that she saw Min-jung, then just stared for a moment before moving on. After thinking about it worriedly, Min-jung embraced this somewhat puzzling reaction as approval.

She wore the contacts to school every day for two weeks, and once on the weekend when she met with her friends. She caught glimpses of herself in windows and saw nothing of her face but the blue irises staring back. They looked electric on her, just like the girl in the perfume ad.

Her eyes felt tearless and filmy after she took the contacts out each night. The whites remained bloodshot each day and the red carried over to the next morning. Finally she decided to stop, and put the lenses away in the top drawer of her desk, behind the pencil case, soaking in their saline bath. She didn’t wear them for the rest of her time in high school, and would have thought they would simply dissolve as time passed, were it not that she would open their container to look at them once in a while. She always had the impression that they were staring back up at her, sneering that she hadn’t been built for blue eyes, or for any other color. By the time of her graduation day, three years later, she hadn’t rooted to the back of the drawer for the lens case in over a year, and thoughts of them had faded.

To Min-jung’s elation she was accepted into one of the universities in Seoul she’d applied to—one of the three most prestigious in the country. She was the only student from her graduating class to be going to the capital. Some would stay in the village, others were going to smaller universities in different townships of the province, and only a few, with the top grades, were moving on to the cities. Min-jung had graduated second in her class and could barely contain her excitement. Her parents celebrated their pride with a family gathering at their small home, and for days her mother would follow her around as she packed, fretting over what her daughter might be forgetting or need in Seoul, even though it was really no more than a three-hour trip away.

Min-jung decided to clean out her old desk the day before she left and came across the lens case. She held it in her hand for a while without opening it, remembering three years before when she’d suffered two weeks of the contacts. She put the case in the front pouch of her backpack and zipped it closed. The next day she woke early, took extra time to comb her hair, which she hoped to perm at her first opportunity in Seoul, then donned the outfit she’d selected the night before.

She and her parents drove to Seoul through a winter landscape of stark brown, interspersed with lingering patches of snow in the well-shaded areas beneath trees and rocky outcrops, listening to pop music on the radio. When the first towers came into view, windows glistening under a cool sun, she felt as if she were coming home where she belonged.

***

Min-jung was just over a month in the city, and the young woman seated at the next table in the café was the most fascinating creature she’d ever seen. The girl’s hair had been dyed dirty blond and the locks hanging down the sides were braided and bound tightly at the bottoms with strips of cowhide. She had her eyebrow and upper ears pierced, silver rings through each, as well as the lobes. Her lashes were long and thick, she wore blood-red lipstick, and a leather vest and matching boots that reached almost to her knees, with a silky mini-skirt over black leggings. Min-jung pretended to busy herself with her phone while examining the girl’s outfit out of the corner of her eye. She sipped her bitter Americano.

When the girl took a call, Min-jung couldn’t help but listen in, discovering that classes at her own university were being discussed. It was all the excuse Min-jung needed to open up a conversation; she haltingly introduced herself to the gorgeous stranger, once the latter had finished the call and examined her reflection in the darkened screen.

The girl’s name was Sun-woo. She had a coolness about her that bordered on disinterest, not enthused much by the fact that the two attended the same school. When she finished her tea, she began to reapply her lipstick in a pearl-framed hand mirror, replacing what had rubbed off on the lip of the cup, and asked, “Any plans tomorrow night?”

Min-jung’s heart kicked into a gallop in her chest, and she was suddenly certain that Sun-woo would be able to notice it thumping through the material of her blouse.

“No. No plans.”

“But it’s Friday. What do you usually do on Friday?”

“Nothing, really.” Min-jung shuddered inside at her own inferiority. She felt like an ugly little fish before Sun-woo’s full-blood lips, caught on a knife edge between acceptance and denial. “I haven’t been in the city that long,” she added, “so I don’t know that many places.”

“You can come with me then. We’ll drink.”

Min-jung accepted, fighting a blush that crept beneath her cool exterior. Sun-woo, a rose of glittering modernity, offered her number.

“Call me.” She gave Min-jung a curt smile, threw the phone and mirror into her purse, and said she had to go.

Min-jung listened to her clip-clop off in her heels, out of the café and onto the busy street, where the sound was instantly lost in the shuffling, motoring world outside. She stared at the new number in her list of contacts, running her eyes over the digits as though she’d never seen such a valuable numeric combination.

On Thursday evening she thought she should call Sun-woo, but didn’t. She eyed the phone for a long time, as she might a small, dangerous reptile which waits to lash out with needle teeth. Even when her gaze moved elsewhere her mind didn’t, and she could see Sun-woo grinning somewhere at the thought of the babyish country bumpkin who’d approached her in the café, snickering with her friends about the whole event. 

She had a late class, and when she got back to her room she spent the evening reading a chapter from her textbook, until drowsiness stole her focus. As she lay down and tried to sleep, Sun-woo came to her, a trim, triumphant specter of female sexuality smiling coldly in the dark. Wariness spread like fungus in the pit of Min-jung’s stomach about the next day. Her hands went to her face, almost unconsciously, to feel for small sore spots that might herald any new pimples festering angrily just beneath her skin.

On Friday afternoon she called Sun-woo from the plaza in front of the student union building. It was a brilliant day, marked by one of the first truly blue skies of early spring (it had been an unusually ashen year in Korea so far). The air held a brisk freshness that made the day at the café earlier in the week feel far away and surreal, but when Sun-woo answered the phone Min-jung felt her throat close up, for a moment sure that she wouldn’t be able to talk in anything but squeaks.

“Hello?” Sun-woo asked a second time, her tone threatening impatience.

“Hello?” Min-jung asked back, as though to suggest that there’d been a problem with the connection.

There was silence from the other end, then: “Who is this?” That voice was achingly self-sure, composed but hurried, as if Sun-woo were a businesswoman juggling several busy tasks at the moment.

“Cho Min-jung.”

“Ah, Min-jung! How’s it going?”

“Good. Yeah. I’m fine.” Some of the tension fell out of her shoulders, but still she stood stiffly, surrounded by rapid-fire conversations and students wolfing down their lunches, far from ready to relax. “Just wanted to know if we’re still on for tonight.”

“Uh, yes, we are. You can make it out then?”

“For sure. Where do you plan to go?”

“Hongdae. You know where that is?”

“That’s where Hongik Univers—”

“Yep, the university’s there. We’re going to Hi-bar.”

“Hi-bar,” Min-jung repeated.

“Uh huh. You ever been there?”

“Um . . . no, actually.” Her face flushed with a feverish bloom. “Maybe we can meet first and head down together,” she suggested weakly.

“No can do. Not around school today.”

“Okay.” Min-jung tried to smooth her voice into that dismissive flatness Sun-woo’s had. “I’ll find it, no problem. See you there then?”

“Yup, catch you later.”

“All right, bye for now.”

“Min-jung?”

“Yes?”

“Eight o’clock.”

Min-jung spent the rest of the day with a typhoon raging inside. It seemed the same thoughts cycled back around again and again. Who would be there? How would she do up her face? What in the hell would she wear? Would Sun-woo pretend to like it or just be disgusted, along with all her friends?

She couldn’t help glancing continuously at her own chest. Her breasts were small, the same size they’d been at the end of middle school. She sat in the back of the lecture hall that afternoon and nonchalantly arched her back, as if she were reaching to scratch an itch, pushing her chest out to see how far she could make her boobs protrude. They still looked like mere bumps to her.

But not so for Sun-woo. Sun-woo’s breasts were full and round. Her legs were nicer too, lithe and long and strong. She could wear anything with those legs. The boys talked about such legs in their chuckling groups, and salarymen did the same while they dragged boozily on their cigarettes in the evenings around emptied soju bottles. Maybe Sun-woo had a boyfriend, and that boy would give Min-jung pleasant, longing goose bumps—like one of the boys from the dramas. Smooth. Handsome. Perfect.

Returning to her dorm room in the early evening, she fell to her knees at the doorway of her small closet, examining her shoe collection. It consisted of four pairs of footwear. Sandals for summer, boots for winter and a pair of sneakers that used to be white, now a light brown with frayed laces. Behind them was a pair of heels she’d worn once, clumsily. She took them out.

She went into the bathroom, where it occurred to her that she was hungry and should eat some dinner, but other thoughts were hovering wasp-like over her appetite. She had to estimate how long it would take her to reach Hongdae and find the bar; she had to shower and wash her face and think about what kind of makeup she’d wear, and apply that makeup, and decide on her outfit—and were there wrinkles in the skirt she’d planned on wearing? She wished to close her eyes and banish the buzzing chatter in her head, but at the same time she needed it—that chatter would save her, ensure that she was prepared and taking care of what needed to be taken care of.

She checked her watch. It was pink rimmed with a green face and purple hands. There was a little white plastic rabbit face, with dots for eyes, at the top of the dial above the twelve. It was cute. She liked cute. And maybe she would later, too. She took the watch off and threw it onto the bed. She had a clock in her phone.

After a shower she sat at her desk with a clean face to administer fresh makeup. When she’d finished powdering herself she gazed into the mirror. Her vision blurred a little as she let her eyes relax, and as she did she found that those eyes staring back out at her looked not unlike two black pebbles accentuated in a melting spring snow bank. Pebbles. She refocused her gaze and studied herself. Her face was plain, unlike like Sun-woo’s face: even without makeup, Sun-woo’s features would still be enviable. Her lips would have pout and her eyes would catch the lights in the room and beam them back like the glitter of a disco ball. Min-jung was pathetic—her face anemic, not with paleness but through the drab lackluster in those wintery pebbles staring out from the mirror world. Sun-woo’s friends would snicker.

No, she corrected herself, they wouldn’t snicker. They’d do nothing so base. They’d simply regard her with barbed passivity, a little curious why their friend dragged this green little fish in. They’d wonder privately if it was an act of charity. They’d talk with Min-jung politely about how the drink tasted, they’d pour her some more, they’d ask her how school was going while their eyes flickered to the door when new people walked through it who might better fill up their night. And then, when she went to the washroom, only then would they cover their mouths to stifle laughter.

A new thought wove its way into her mind, settling there to warm up in the heat of her fervor. She opened the top desk drawer, where a notebook sat dormant beneath a sprawl of hair elastics, colorful pens and tissue packages. At the very back of it her fingers came across the familiar lens case. It already seemed foreign to her, a vestige of her old village life that had tagged along here so it could hide on the edges of a new reality. She unscrewed the left lid, scarcely believing that the contents would still be wearable, but when the top came off there the first one was, still clean and bright in its saline pool, as though it had been preserved inside glass.

She put the case down and trotted excitedly to the kitchen faucet. She washed her fingers, came back and carefully fished the blue contact out. She focused on her left eye as she brought the lens up to meet her iris, the lash above it atremble, threatening to wink closed against her will. She tugged the bottom lash down heavily with her middle finger and let the lens slide fully onto her eyeball. It settled into place with miraculous compatibility. The second one stung more going in, and the old spidery trail of veins sprouted from the corner of her eye, but she blinked and blinked, and when her eyes watered with tears they seemed to wash the irritation away down her cheek. The white returned, framing the oceanic blue, and Min-jung broke into a small, delighted grin.

The time to set out arrived with tremendous speed. She hadn’t had time to eat and hoped that those she was meeting at the bar would opt to order food, though the hunger scratching at her stomach walls was muffled under a damp blanket of anxiety. She hurried out of the dormitory and down the steps to the street, where a taxi would be making its rounds at the campus border, ready to whisk her away to the subway station.

She arrived in Hongdae twenty minutes early and found Hi-bar at ten to eight. Standing before the tinted glass of its door she was struck with a wave of paranoia. Sun-woo and her friends couldn’t come along and find her standing out here alone like this, waiting like a pitiful dog at the door for its owner to let it in out of the elements. A minute had gone by as she stood contemplating the maw of the bar amidst the perpetual evening shuffle of well-dressed bodies.

She strode away in the direction she’d come, in steps as wide as the heels, already testing her ankles’ patience, would allow without sacrificing her composure. She walked around the block, keeping her head down, and kept going past the next intersection, two blocks, three blocks, then four, and at the fourth she turned to pass through what was little more than a glorified alleyway, where an old woman, eyes set deep into the leathery and sun-kissed folds of her face, sat grimly at a steaming stall roofed in plastic and lit by a bare light bulb. She was selling odeng immersed nakedly in a midnight broth.

Min-jung hurried past the stall and only slowed when she reached the next street, glad to have put the old woman and her used up, resentful stare behind her. She headed back in the direction of Hi-bar, staring into the warm glow of her phone screen as the minutes passed thankfully by.

She reached the bar again at 8:05, pausing at the door only long enough to catch her reflection in it, making sure that nothing was dramatically out of place. Her eyes were dark, peering out from a raccoon mask, cast in blinking shadows from the neon lights that screamed silently from the building fronts.

Sun-woo was nowhere to be seen inside. The main area was relatively well-lit by studio lights shining between black steel rafters. Round plastic tables sat dotted about like greasy pores. The place smelled faintly of floor cleaner and fruit, and she wondered halfheartedly if the latter scent was something they pumped into the place each evening through the air ducts. A few men, by the looks of it not much older than her, sat at a table near the back, shrouded in their own peculiar and forlorn gloom. One was speaking gruffly, hunched over a drink, while the other two listened with the complacent disinterest of those wiling away a romanceless night. They didn’t look at her as she came in—she’d watched them just to see if they would.

Around half past the hour, Sun-woo entered the bar with another girl and a trio of men, all older looking than the ones sitting at the back of the venue. Min-jung was sipping hesitantly at a Long Island iced tea she’d ordered shortly before, feeling almost sick with despair and betrayal.  Those feelings melted away, replaced with rekindled anxiety, as she and Sun-woo made eye contact from halfway across the room. Sun-woo was stunning, enviable, captivating.

“Ooo,” she squealed, with what struck Min-jung as uncharacteristic childishness, and rushed forward reaching out for her hands. “You look beautiful!” She studied Min-jung’s face with the intensity of a practiced interrogator watching for a suspect’s twitches and ticks. There was strong alcohol on her breath. “Your eyes!”

Min-jung felt hot blood coloring her cheeks. “Uh, I . . .”

“Beautiful,” Sun-woo said again, and by now her entourage was looming behind her, all staring at Min-jung with unreadable expressions. One of them was wearing a bowler hat. She’d never personally known any boy who wore a bowler hat—she’d only seen such people here and there on the streets on Seoul. When she looked at the man over Sun-woo’s shoulder, almost helplessly, he smiled at her; it was mostly in his eyes, but it was there and very real.

 “You already have a drink,” commented Sun-woo.

Min-jung smiled the easy smile that she’d practiced in the mirror. “I was thirsty,” she said shyly, suddenly annoyed at Sun-woo for acting surprised, especially when she was half an hour late. 

Sun-woo smirked with a welcome ember of warmth, but there was a coolness coming off her like the air of an open refrigerator. Was she embarrassed by Min-jung, or was there some level of acceptance evident there? Min-jung didn’t have time to think about it because Sun-woo and her companions were filing toward the bar, where she found herself staring at the back of the man in the bowler hat. She migrated unsurely back to her seat.

Bowler hat’s name was Kwon-jin, and after four drinks he had one palm resting calmly on Min-jung’s knee, like a lizard sunning itself on a rock. Sun-woo had progressed to shrieking laughter in explosive bursts and her face had taken on a drunken flush. After a while the grin stopped leaving her face at all and she would cackle hysterically at quips made around the table. She was beginning to take on the appearance of a grotesque wide-mouthed clown.

Min-jung felt light and airy, warm, and she wanted to bury her lips in the side of Kwon-jin’s neck. For the past half hour they’d been talking almost solely to each other, wrapped up in their own little world scented with the fumes of their drinks and the secret aroma of his skin that she detected when she leaned in close to him. She wondered crazily if he could smell her hair, and if he’d like it. She’d used strawberry shampoo. She hoped he liked strawberries. His hand slid further up her leg.

After the sixth drink he looked at her closely and said he wanted to go out for a smoke, and as he stared at her from beneath eyebrows that were trimmed and pampered and somehow enthrallingly different from what she’d known, she said she’d come out with him. They stepped out, seemingly unnoticed by the intoxicated gaggle, which included the once-divine Sun-woo, now relegated to a shameful Medusa tucked away in a cave at the back of Min-jung’s pulsing high. Sun-woo could stay there, she thought—this was her time now, and her guy. She giggled at her own boldness as they left the bar.

The air outside was refreshingly cool. In its chilly embrace Kwon-jin looked like a beacon of warmth leaning against the front wall of the bar. As he lit his cigarette he looked at her, leaned in and said, “I want you. Tonight.”

They left right then and there and found a motel called Palace Aphrodite ten minutes later, with exotic Grecian-style statues of nudes molded from cream colored plaster out front.

***

He was her first, but she tried to act like he wasn’t. She cried out when he entered her, at a sharp internal sting, but the sting was short-lived and afterward there was an awkward and new pleasure. She lay there and let Kwon-jin take control, not knowing how to act and stifling her own cries with whitened lips, a hand across her mouth as his thrusting increased in intensity.

There was no hiding the rose of blood left on the sheet below her; after Kwon-jin had pulled the condom off and unceremoniously flipped the light back on, she stared at the spot with some feeling between guilt and interest. She was sure Kwon-jin’s gaze would move to her in disgust, but instead he headed for the shower, and later, while she was taking her own, he stripped the sheet off the bed and left it bundled in a chair by the window. They fell asleep with an arm’s length of space between them and remained like that, as far as she could tell, until she awoke with the morning sun in the window.

A headache thudded in her head as she rolled onto her back. Her body felt as papery and parched as her throat. Her guts gurgled threateningly and the urge to vomit came with little warning. She breathed heavily, combatting her stomach’s orders for her to evacuate its contents. Her vision was blurry and her lids scraped dryly over her eyes, like wipers turned on against a rainless windshield; she imagined them making  a scrawwwk sound, and rubbed them with the miserable little wrenches, stopping suddenly when pain shot in bright lightning bolts from her pupils back through the jelly of her eyeballs, setting them on fire.

She blinked furiously, and as she did so became aware that Kwon-jin was no longer asleep as she’d thought. He was awake and had his head tilted to stare at her glassily.

“Your eyes,” he said. “Just gorgeous.”

The pain seemed to run out of her like sand through a child’s fingers. She opened her eyes wider, innocently. “You like them?” she asked, trying to hold back a smile. She’d forgotten to remove the contacts, she realized now—but no matter, they could come out later.

“Yeah, I like them a lot.”

At that moment, for a reason she couldn’t pinpoint, Min-jung was sure that Kwon-jin didn’t remember her name. Maybe he’d never really known it in the first place—just another word printed on the disposable banner of drunkenness. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was the way he was staring at her, and she tried to picture what he was seeing, visualizing the blue eyes staring back, piercing and highlighted with sapphire brilliance in the stream of morning sunlight. She decided that he probably wanted her again, and that she might even want him too. She was a bit sore, but thought it couldn’t hurt in the same way a second time.

She rose from the bed unsteadily and strode, with all the grace she could manage in the white robe that she’d donned before sleep, into the bathroom, where she crouched over the toilet and tried to retch quietly. As her meager stomach contents were finally dredged up into the bowl, she remembered that he hadn’t eaten any dinner the night before.

She saw the eyes the entire time, her blue eyes, glowing in her memory like the afterimages of twin lights flashed in the dark, the way Kwon-jin must have seen them, as Sun-woo had the night before. As everyone had.

Kwon-jin was already dressed by the time she got out of the bathroom, saying hurriedly that he had to go. Min-jung looked at him through the smeared griminess of the lenses. It hadn’t even occurred to her to take them off in the bathroom.

“Can you check out alone?” he asked, eyeing himself in the mirror over the desk and opening a can of orange juice from the mini fridge with a sharp hiss. “I’ll text you,” he added.

“Sure, yes, that’s okay.”

Min-jung fixated on his hands in the mirror’s reflection, as they up the brass buttons of his dress shirt. It was something to stare at while she waited to find whether her remaining bile would stay down.

Kwon-jin went to the windowsill and retrieved his hat, sitting there like a black piece of night. At the door he patted his pants pocket and reached inside it for his phone.

“What’s your number?” he asked, shooting her a glance.

When their eyes met Min-jung felt that gaze again, the one in which she felt that, for just a moment, she had the whole of his attention.

“I gave it to you last night.”

“Ah, right.” Kwon-jin tapped at the screen, his blank downward stare not coloring with recognition.

“Cho Min-jung.”

“Right.” He slipped the phone back into his pocket and put on his shoes. “I’ll text you,” he said again. “Sure you’re okay here?”

“Yes, fine,” she replied, and after the door had shut gently behind him, she went back into the bathroom and peeled the contact lenses off. For a second she was sure she’d tear off the top layer of her eye with them, the way hairs were torn off with a Band-Aid, but then the lenses were in her palm, as light and inconsequential as snowflakes. With her left hand she splashed water into her eyes to douse their burning, but it only made them itch. She retrieved the lens case from her purse and slipped the contacts back into the same oily-looking pools of solution they’d rested in for years, resolving to buy new ones as soon as possible.

Green. Green might be nice. Green like Teacher Brian’s eyes long, long ago. Like precious stones. Cat’s eyes.

***

He texted her for the first time while she was in class. Min-jung was staring drowsily at the front of the room, holding her chin up with one hand, and was jolted by the buzz. The phone was resting on her leg, separated from the skin by the thin fabric of her dress. She lowered her head inconspicuously to see it was Kwon-jin asking if he could meet her sometime that week.

I have classes during the day, she texted.

At night then? 😉

Min-jung grinned at the cuteness. Such a cute boy. Such a stylish boy. She wondered if they would have sex again, and if it would be better this time, without the pain at the beginning and the worry that she must be doing something wrong—because it seemed that she hadn’t.

She got halfway through suggesting they meet that night when she stopped and deleted the words. That would sound too anxious and juvenile, and maybe even slutty. She began to tap away again, now oblivious to the class going on around her.

How about Thursday night?

Waiting for the reply was drudgery. When the phone buzzed again she felt that the sound was magnified in the room and everyone could hear it. A message of confirmation from Kwon-jin was displayed there, bigger than the classroom and the school campus and everyone around her. He was from the world out there, the real world, and he was doing real stuff right now, watched and admired by people—and yet she had his attention. He wanted her.

The rest of the day passed with dismal sluggishness, Min-jung anticipating her arrival home where she could think, experiment with some new eye shadow, and maybe compose another text to Kwon-jin. It was Tuesday.

She met him at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, in a skewed reflection, it seemed, of the night they’d first met less than a week before. In this reflection there was just the two of them, and Sun-woo was but a name in Min-jung’s phone. She hadn’t told Sun-woo she was meeting Kwon-jin, upon both his request and Min-jung’s own intuition. There were plenty of ways, she imagined, that Sun-woo’s knowing could sour things.

They met at a noisy bar called Rotation. By eight it already had a good sized crowd filling the ring of tables in low, reddish light, or propped against the circular glass counter near the center of the establishment—a glowing hub housing the liquor bottles and black-clad tenders.

Kwon-jin wasn’t wearing his bowler hat tonight. He’d combed his straight, longish hair neatly to the side, with a part in the middle, and was wearing a white dress shirt with a vest that looked like brown leather. He’d donned a short maroon tie, looped loosely around his collar.

She wasn’t sure that he’d notice, but when Kwon-jin said, “Oh, green tonight,” a cool and welcome sweat broke out on Min-jung’s arms. She’d purchased the new lenses the previous Sunday, after hours of obsessive questing.

Kwon-jin wasn’t smiling, though. “I liked the blue,” he said.

The sweat on Min-jung’s arms seemed to freeze and evaporate like dry ice. Her heart sunk.

“Y-you liked the blue better?”

“Mm,” Kwon-jin nodded, and sat down, leaving her standing. He already had a drink on the table. He took a sip, looked up and motioned for her to sit.

She took the seat across from him. He gave her a small and deprecating grin with his lips that left his eyes looking like they were running on separate wiring.

“Do you usually change your lenses around like that?” he asked. His voice carried no trace of humor—it was flat, with disappointment gliding below the surface. “One night this, one night that?”

“I . . . no . . . I just wanted to try green,” she stammered.

Kwon-jin leaned back and folded his arms. Min-jung wanted suddenly to hide her face in her hands, but knew it would be a death sentence for their date.

“How long did you wear the blue for?” he asked, taking another sip of his drink. When Min-jung didn’t answer he raised one of his eyebrows, cocking his head at her. The action made him look bizarre and hawk-like.

“I don’t know what you mean. I don’t—I didn’t wear them all the time. Just to go out, at night.”

“How many times?”

The immediate, honest answer—once—was on her lips. The idea of telling Kwon-jin about wearing the stupid lenses in high school wasn’t an option. She would sound like a child and it would be the end of whatever they had. Her face began to crumple.

“Never mind,” said Kwon-jin, and the little grin returned. “I was just curious. The blue was gorgeous, you know. Anyway, there’s something I want to talk to you about tonight.”

Min-jung swallowed hard. “What?” she asked, a little stunned.

“An opportunity for you, if you want it.”

Kwon-jin explained, and that was how Min-jung heard about what would become her first modeling gig. An acquaintance of his was a photographer—a good one, Kwon-jin said, a great one even—working for a small-but-expanding clothing company. The company had also put this acquaintance in charge of finding models for the shoots. If Min-jung wanted, Kwon-jin would suggest her to him.

“He’ll trust me,” he said. “You show up with that blue in and it’ll click for them that you’re a fit. That’s what they want—that’s just what they want. You’ve got the face and the figure too. They’ll like you.”

Min-jung wondered if she might be dreaming it all, but knew for sure she wasn’t when, on Saturday, Kwon-jin took her to a small basement studio beneath a building that housed a second-floor galbi restaurant and a third-floor pool hall. The walls were black-painted brick, and near the back, in front of a slack green curtain, sat a bench covered with a white sheet. Kwon-jin’s acquaintance, a pale man with a patchy beard sprouting out of his face and hair that looked like it was darting in all directions to escape his scalp, grinned toothily when they met.

“I’m Choe Gwang-su,” he said.

“Cho Min-jung.”

He handed some clothes on hangers to Min-jung and rolled his eyes about as if to feign a search for a changing room that wasn’t there. He told her she could go behind the curtain to put them on. There was a stain on the striped purple and white shirt he handed her. The stain was on the white part and it looked like a coffee spill. Gwang-su saw her eyes gravitate to it.

“Practice, practice,” he said. “Just for practice.” The toothy grin didn’t fade from his face. His teeth weren’t very good, yellowish and shiny, fighting for space on his jaw. It didn’t seem to bother him, however, and that grin was still there when she emerged from behind the curtain in the new clothes, and still yet while he instructed her on how to sit and posture herself in front of the camera, chuckling from time to time for no particular reason. “Pretty girl you got here,” he said once, turning to Kwon-jin, who hardly looked up from what he was reading.

“Yup.”

“I’ll have to get her sizes later.”

Min-jung’s heart pounded and she stared into the flash again and again through the old blue contacts, telling herself she’d have to buy more.

By the time they’d really gotten going, even Kwon-jin, sitting cross legged at the back of the room on a folding stool, wore a slight expression of satisfaction. He flipped through a magazine whose title Min-jung was too busy staring into the bright lights to make out.

***

Within three weeks’ time a shooting schedule had evolved: Tuesday and Thursday evenings, plus part of the afternoon on Saturday, always in the same basement studio with Gwang-su. Sometimes other men would come as well, who were dressed better than the photographer; they were representatives for various accessory outlets, it was explained to her, and they brought necklaces and earrings and plastic headbands. They came for the close-up shots. She was being paid about 30,000 won an hour, which wasn’t so much, but, as Kwon-jin and Gwang-su reminded her, it was just part-time work for now. The representatives who came and went, and whose names she never knew, would pay her a lump sum of 60,000. Sometimes the shoot was a little over two hours, sometimes a little less. A lot of that time was spent on make-up application. They would bring her glitter or lipstick or rouge and stand behind her while she sat applying it before a sheet of mirror glass propped against one of the walls. Sometimes she felt beautiful when she was done, because someone would make an impressed sigh, and sometimes she felt hideous despite all the words of praise during the shoot. In the latter case she would just focus on the blue eyes that she knew were staring out at the camera, alternately foxy and doe-like—but always sensual, she believed, always enticing, because afterward she’d be escorted by Kwon-jin to a hotel, where he’d pay in full and then thrust away inside her with a slow, impersonal determination, until he came at the end with a soft grunt. It was part of his coolness, she thought; always cool, everywhere. That was Kwon-jin.

That summer, not long before the end-of-semester exams, Kwon-jin called her just as she was leaving class and asked if she could meet him in an hour. Min-jung told him she had two more classes that afternoon before dinnertime. She thought she heard Kwon-jin snicker, but couldn’t be sure that’s what it was.

“Just this once,” he said. “It’s something important. You’ll like it.”

“We have exams soon, I’m not sure I shou—”

“You’ll be fine. It’s only two classes, I think you can stand to miss them once. You’ll like this. C’mon and I’ll buy your mochaccino.”

Min-jung looked at her watch. The rabbit face on it stared at the sky with dumb gumdrop apathy. “Where are you?”

“I’ll be at Gwang-su’s studio,” he replied, not answering the question. “Just meet me there and, yeah, we’ll go for coffee.”

Min-jung knew that she wouldn’t make it back for her last class of the day. Gwang-su’s studio was halfway across the city. “All right,” she said. “But I want a double shot of espresso in my mocha.”

“Yeah, you got it.”

Min-jung took the subway and found Kwon-jin waiting outside Gwang-su’s studio as promised. He took her to the Arrow café nearby and bought her the double shot mochaccino.

“Come up to the second floor,” he said, and left her to wait for the drink.

She bought a chocolate chip cookie while she waited for her mocha, and with both in hand made her way up the stairs. The second floor was largely vacant. Two girls sat off to the right, chattering in hushed voices. One of the Arrow staff, wearing in a black apron, wiped down tables with a yellow cloth.

“Got you something,” Min-jung said, approaching Kwon-jin. She held the cookie out, wrapped in a napkin.

“Okay.”

 Min-jung hesitated for a moment, then placed the cookie beside his drink. He didn’t touch it.

“Have a seat,” Kwon-jin said impatiently, as though she were an overactive child.

When she’d sat down he reached for the bag hanging on the back of his chair. It was made of leather and had braided strips of dark cowhide hanging from the top flap.

Those strips reminded her of Sun-woo. What was Sun-woo doing these days, she wondered. Min-jung had only spoken to her once since Hi-bar, in a short and stilted conversation over the phone. She remembered her growing ambivalence toward Sun-woo that drunken night, but more and more it seemed to be replaced by her previous admiration. She wondered if Sun-woo was dating one of the guys she’d come to the bar with, and considered at least asking Kwon-jin how she was doing—they were apparently friends, after all—but her thoughts were interrupted when he flipped open the top flap of the bag, the little rawhide braids flicking out of sight, and produced from a pamphlet.

“You,” he said.

“Me?”

Min-jung waited while he opened it, heart beginning to thud. Inside there were pictures of three different girls, or at least their faces, and one of them was Min-jung’s own, set against a black background. She was wearing sapphire earrings that looked like raindrops, from a shoot two weeks before. Text below the picture lit up the page in shimmery Hangul: OCEAN TEARS, 30% DISCOUNT, AUGUST ONLY.

At first glance she barely recognized herself. Gwang-su’s set lights had caught her eyes with sparkling brilliance, making the rest of her face fade into a kind of bland, prim obscurity. Her irises matched the earrings and made them look cut from the same mother stone, though she was under no illusions that they were real sapphire.

Kwon-jin was holding the pamphlet out to her.

“This is where they’ve been using the photos?” she asked, taking it from him.

“The company liked this one. A lot of the pictures don’t go anywhere, don’t get published, but this one . . .” He leaned over the table and tapped at the photo with his long index finger. “What did I tell you about the blue eyes?”

He reached back into the bag and retrieved a small rolled-up poster, unfurling it before her. This one was different. It was from the shoot where they’d had her put on the swimsuit. She hadn’t wanted to do that one initially, and had wished she could say something to Kwon-jin, but that was one of the days that he’d gone out to do some errand or other during the shoot, and Gwang-su and the swimwear people hadn’t seemed to sense her discomfort. She’d donned the two-piece behind the curtain as usual, and when she re-emerged Gwang-su told her that it would just be quick and that the photos would be from the waist up. It wasn’t warm that day in the studio—it never was, in fact—and Gwang-su had explained before that it had to be kept a bit cool so the models wouldn’t sweat, but that day it felt cooler than ever and she’d been shivering by the time they’d finished telling her how to pose and how to smile into the cyclopean lens.

The photo on the poster was indeed from the waist up. Min-jung had her head tilted slightly down in it, her eyes inviting and center stage, glowing like gemstones yet again. Behind her the green screen displayed the rippling turquoise shallows of a white sand beach. Her lips had a pout to them and the curvature of her breasts was curiously well defined—a trick of the lighting, she supposed.

Even as Kwon-jin watched her, a furious blush was forcing its way into Min-jung’s cheeks. The poster was in no way an ad for a swimsuit store.

CLUB CANCUN! it announced in large orange letters, the words bordered by palm treeson either side. Just below it, also in English: LIFE’S A BEACH. She didn’t know what that was supposed to mean precisely; she doubted many other Koreans in the city did either. Beneath her picture were the cover charges for men and women, and the information that every Saturday night was Swimsuit Night and that the girls wearing them got in FREE.

She studied the poster, reading it over again and again, but her attention continued to be drawn back to her photo dominating it. She was suddenly a bit sickened by how plump she looked. Girls would look at this and laugh.

“What are they going to do with these posters?” she asked Kwon-jin, already knowing the answer for the most part.

“They’ll be put up all over the place,” he replied. “Telephone poles, doors, windows, wherever, all part of the advertising. You’ll be well known.”

“I look fat,” she burst out. “And I had a pimple on my chin that week. I think I can see it here.”

“You don’t look fat. Anyway, the posters are already printed and they’re going up this week. They paid you for the shoot already, you have the money, so there’s nothing we can do. You’ll probably see them around this weekend.”

“How many posters?” Min-jung asked.

“How the hell should I know?”

The retort was harsh enough to make Min-jung straighten in her seat, taken aback. “I was just wondering,” she said quietly, feeling tears rising like sap inside her, ready to prick her eyes. She didn’t know where they came from. When had she become so fragile?

“You look fine,” Kwon-jin said, softening a little. “Just stop talking about being fat and all that. It’s cute the first time, then it gets annoying.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Please don’t be angry at me.”

Kwon-jin didn’t respond. He rolled the poster up again and stuffed it back into his bag. He left the pamphlet with Min-jung.

“Anyway, that’s what I wanted to show you. How’s the coffee?”

Min-jung glanced down at the mochaccino. She hadn’t taken a drink yet and wondered whether Kwon-jin had noticed.

“It’s good,” she lied.

***

Min-jung scored miserably on two of her exams and well below average on three others. She read her grade listings online, double-checking the numbers with dread. Yet she’d only missed six classes, she thought incredulously. She’d only missed six classes in the whole semester.

At first she was angry at her professors—her dim, ignorant professors. She wasn’t a dumb girl, she’d nailed the CSAT and gotten into this university in the first place—did they not comprehend that?

In truth, though, she knew that attendance and her professors had nothing to do with it. She had guessed her way through the exams, aware that attending her lectures counted for little when stacked against the barely opened textbooks piled on her dorm room desk. Some of the books had been quite expensive, and she’d had to call her parents in that first week to ask them to wire money for the purchases. Her mother had grumbled about how pricey everything was these days, especially in Seoul, but sent the amount she asked for anyway.

A wave of guilt washed over her. She’d gone into the exams knowing what she’d jotted down in a couple notepads toted along to classes, nothing more.

But she was a model. She’d been out that weekend and indeed seen the posters up, on telephone poles, on shop windows and doors, all over the place, just like Kwon-jin had said. People knew her face. Boys would go to the club hoping in a vain kind of fantasy that she, the blue-eyed beach girl from the ads, would be there, and maybe even want to dance with them. Club Cancun was newly opened and she’d toyed with the idea of actually showing up on Saturday night in a two-piece bathing suit, but in the end decided against it. Better to keep the fantasy alive and well. Instead, she’d finally met with Sun-woo and they went out for a girl’s night at a dark dance club three floors underground, where the wait staff brought some boys to their seats from another table. She’d made out with the best looking one of them on the couches, flicking her tongue in and out of his mouth near the end of the encounter. Eventually Sun-woo, liquored up and not letting the partially intimidated yet slavering boy she was flirting with lay so much as a fingertip on her taught body, suggested to Min-jung with a smile that they leave their hopeless admirers in search of more dance and less conversation.

Sun-woo wasn’t a model, thought Min-jung, taught body or not—she was just a student. Min-jung had advanced past her in such a short time. When she told Sun-woo about the work she’d been doing, the other had just laughed, airy and unaffected, and Min-jung wondered whether she’d even seen any of her posters around yet.

She slipped into a new semester vowing dig into her books, and her previous exam marks faded into the background. Sometimes she made it to class and sometimes she didn’t. The times she didn’t she was usually with Kwon-jin, sipping sugar and caffeine in the loud, buzzing cafés he texted her to meet him at after lunch, not so much asking her out as informing her of where she could see him. They talked little during these dates, absently observing the sepia-toned wallpaper images of smiling dark-skinned people with baskets on their heads, the images interspersed with scraps of English and Korean detailing the humble and honest origins of each and every coffee bean.

On those long autumn afternoons, when they didn’t go out for coffee or late lunch, they’d rent a motel room for a couple hours and have sex in the rusty half-light filtering through the window. When she wasn’t with Kwon-jin, she’d be down in Gwang-su’s studio with the clients of the day. The studio was even chillier now that summer’s heat had fled, while the frequency of less-clothed shots seemed to increase. She wondered when the clothing people would start advertising their winter stock, but never voiced the question. More nightclub representatives came now and they all wanted to see a little cleavage, though they never stated this directly. Sometimes it was a tube top, sometimes it was high-cut jean shorts and a buttonless vest tied across her breasts like a giant bandana. Still the heat never came on in the studio.

“Can’t have it too warm, you’ll sweat,” Gwang-su would mumble when the goose bumps puckered up on Min-jung’s arms, offering his justification each time as if it were the first. In mid-October or so she began to shiver during shots and Gwang-su would tell her, at first in assuring tones and then with frustration, to at least hold still for the second or two while she waited for the shutter to click.

There was a heater in the ceiling, once white but now yellow and grime-crusted with age. She suspected that its remote, if there was one, wouldn’t come out of hiding until deep winter. Or perhaps Gwang-su and the men who came would just be wearing thicker and thicker clothes each time, while they carried in their hangers of thin blouses, miniskirts and fishnet leggings. 

Min-jung had stopped talking with Kwon-jin about the shoots. He’d quit coming to them altogether around the end of September, though he would occasionally walk with her to the studio’s ground floor entrance and she would thank him for escorting her before he strode off.

During the first school semester she’d worked out her shoot dates to fall only on afternoons when she didn’t have classes. Her class schedule had changed after exams, and now she missed one of two classes a week, sometimes more. But she was a model, after all, and at night, after she got back to her dorm room, blessedly alone in her little snail shell of space, she could catch up on the studying she’d missed. She could pull it off, she told herself: she was good at self-study, and when that exam came around she’d ace it and things would be fine. It would all be fine. Kwon-jin liked her—he said so when a few drinks had loosened him up, or when they were lying in bed after lovemaking—and he wouldn’t let her drift out anywhere farther than she could swim back from. He was smart, and he was older; yes, he’d watch out for her.

***

She didn’t pass any of her finals that year.

Her parents, who she talked to once a week in somewhat strained phone conversations, were eager and adamant to hear about their young savant’s winter grades. In a way, they anticipated that Min-jung would live out their unfulfilled scholarly aspirations. Her father, after all, hadn’t been able to attend university. Her mother had managed to do so for a semester, but after that she’d had to return to the village and take care of Min-jung’s late grandfather, who spent five long and diseased years spiraling toward death like dishwater around a drain.

Min-jung broke the inevitable news and braced for the response. Her mother’s voice snapped back at her with a sharp and incredulous retort. “You failed all of them? What do you mean you failed all of them?”

Before Min-jung could reply she heard her mother repeating the news in a distressed tone that carried all too well over the phone line.

“Mom, I—”

“You what?”

“I’m sorry! I’m doing my best.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” her mother said crisply. “I’ll believe it when your marks start showing it. It wasn’t easy to send you up there. You know we’re not a wealthy family.”

“I’m really sorry,” she said quietly. “I’ll do better.”

“You will,” said her mother, and her voice took on a hush of confidentiality, as if a door had just been closed to leave the two of them alone. “Unless you want to come pick up where your father leaves off in the fields.”

She felt a nauseating hollow open inside her, like the way her stomach dropped at the height of a theme park ride. She glanced out the window and caught sight of the city lights, burning quietly in their legions, illuminating the night sky orange. The world out there, her world, suddenly seemed surreal, a concrete and steel forest of glowing modernity—and half the length of a small country felt like a thousand miles out into the dark. She had a place here in the arteries of the future.

“That won’t happen.”

“Good. I hope you—”

“I’m better than that.”

There was a moment of stunned silence from the other end of the line.

“Excuse me?”

“I said I’m better than that,” Min-jung said, louder this time. “I’ll never work those fields, why don’t you understand that yet?”

“You’d better watch what yo—”

“Bye for now, mom. Need to study.” She pressed end call and cast the phone onto the bed, then looked at the stack of books piled greyly in their lonely corner of the desk, topped with a hand mirror and a beaded necklace. She sighed, afraid the phone might spring musically to life again, and sat down heavily in her desk chair, the muscles of her shoulders tense.

After some time had passed, she formed a secretive smile, simultaneously seeing herself do it in her mind’s eye, as though in a dream state. She’d never liked her looks. Her face was too wide and her cheeks always seemed to fill out with a squirrelly puffiness when she grinned too broadly. Her bottom lip was much fatter than the top and she’d always thought it lent her face a stupefied pout. She tried to brush her teeth to whiteness, sometimes rubbing her gum line raw until it bled, but none of that could remove the crowding on her lower jaw and the fact that her two front teeth were different sizes. The funds for orthodontic work had never been there. Min-jung had grim memories of standing in the calcium-stained bathroom mirror late at night, weeping softly as she tried to push her teeth straight with her fingers. Her smile was normally toothless and when she laughed she did so with a hand over her mouth.

Yet it wasn’t as bad as she had thought. Not so bad at all. In fact, somehow she was beautiful—she knew that now. Kwon-jin knew it, Gwang-su knew it, the clubbing masses knew it as well. Even Sun-woo knew it, if she hadn’t before. She had to. Sun-woo with her white rows of teeth like sculpted ivory.

She knew.

***

In February Min-jung went home for a New Year’s holiday of averted gazes and forced smiles, with news of her academic shortcomings having long since percolated amongst her relatives. A week after she returned to the city, Gwang-su moved to a new studio and things changed. This new studio was above ground, on the second floor above a Samsung electronics outlet, six blocks from the old place. It was cleaner, better lit, and the heater was on the first time Min-jung entered, offering a warm embrace after the chill of the streets. The space was largely empty, appearing wider than necessary to hold the equipment and scant furniture Gwang-su had moved from the basement studio. Wires snaked across the floor like long black roots.

“We’ll be doing things up here from now on,” he told her, turned away with his head down to examine something on the main camera. “Things’ll be better.”

“What do you mean?”

“More models, more shoots, better location . . .” He trailed off, tinkering with something that made a soft, grinding series of clicks.

“How many models do you have?” she asked, realizing with a start that she’d never thought to inquire.

“No one regular, if that’s what you’d call it. ‘Cept for you. Couple girls come in now and again for an hour-long shoot. In and out. We’ll get more regulars with this place.”

“How do you know?” She felt a spark of resentment toward Gwang-su, with his ragged mane of hair and queerly vulturine movements. Gwang-su who’d told her uncountable times with a dismissive wave to go into the dark behind the curtain, to strip in the subterranean cool and put on whatever had been carted down his dusty, dirty steps that day by flabby men in sweatshirts and slacks. Gwang-su, for whom she’d never been late and drawn business into his dungeon without a complaint.

“Your pay will go up—40,000 won an hour if we get enough business for you to do four shoots a week, three hours a go.”

“Just wait, I don’t know if I can—”

“Sunday,” Gwang-su interrupted, as if she hadn’t spoken. “The fourth shoot would be on Sundays. Afternoon.”

Min-jung opened her mouth to protest, but made no sound. Her throat seemed to have sealed shut, her thoughts piling up and drowning each other like panicked swimmers.

“Ach!” Gwang-su pulled the camera off the tripod and went to the bench in front of the green screen. He sat down with the device on his lap. “Goddamn thing,” he mumbled under his breath.

Min-jung continued to stand there, and at length Gwang-su put the camera aside and looked back up at her.

“We’re not doing any shooting today, by the way. That’s not why I called you here.”

“You just wanted me to see the place?”

“No,” he said, and gestured for her to draw closer. “Come over here, I feel like you’re trying to back out the door or something.”

Min-jung took a step forward.

“Would you just come? I’m not going to keep yelling the whole time just so you can hear me.”

When Min-jung was standing between the tripod and the bench, the seat of which was clad in black faux leather, Gwang-su’s face grew smooth and serious.

“You know that you’re quite lovely,” he said. “I know you do. It’s written all over you in the shoots, and yeah, we’re getting more of them now. A lot of my clients want you in their ads.”

Min-jung smiled genuinely, a wave of elation rolling through her.

“Especially with those blue eyes. Works on you. It’s good, Min-jung, it’s good.” He leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees. “But I’ve got a suggestion.”

“What?” Min-jung asked. Her senses heightened, and the room popped out at her in sharp new lines. A smell like plaster and the pages of a new magazine haunted her nostrils.

“Wider eyes,” Gwang-su said. “I want you to think about them.”

“Wider eyes?”

“Bigger looking, like the foreign girls.” He raised his hand to his face and used his thumb and forefinger to pull at his top and bottom lids, revealing a white diamond shaped expanse of eyeball. Min-jung winced involuntarily. “Some eyelid surgery will do it,” Gwang-su continued with uncharacteristic earnestness. “You try to open wide in front of the camera, I see you trying, but it doesn’t work.”

Min-jung’s face was a furnace, and she blinked hard several times, holding back a mist of tears threatening to fog her vision. She knew then that she’d always hated her eyes, and she knew that Gwang-su knew. He’d known since the first shoot.

“People like the wide eyes,” he said. “They look brighter that way. It’s cuter, sexier. That’s what people want to see. Don’t you want that too?”

She took a breath and tried unsuccessfully to compose herself. “I’ll think about it,” she heard herself say, and then she was stuttering out a hurried goodbye and moving for the door. Gwang-su said nothing else as she opened it and let herself out of the room. The stained, maroon-carpeted hall, the icy stairwell, the street, all were seen through those hated windows. The winter sun blinded her and she marched with her head down to the nearest subway tunnel.

***

Two weeks later Min-jung sat in the waiting room of a brightly lit and wood-paneled clinic called Nu-U Cosmetic Surgery, awaiting consultation. The name was stamped in gold plated letters across an oval mahogany board on the wall opposite the door. The room smelled faintly of antiseptic buried under clouds of chemical spray air fresheners that would read something like Mountain Breeze on the label. One of the overhead lights buzzed erratically. She waited for three hours, while the men and women around her, silent except for the turn of well-thumbed fashion magazine pages and the tinkle of new phone messages, migrated one by one into the rooms down the hallway past the reception desk, where doors were shut gently behind them.

By the time Min-jung’s turn came, she was the second to last person in the waiting room. The final visitor was a middle-aged woman with wrinkles around her mouth and soft jowls hanging off an otherwise narrow jaw. She was fixated on a smooth, poreless face grinning vivaciously from the page of a magazine, tracing her finger over the picture again and again, down the jawline, around the chin. When Min-jung spared a glance back at her, the woman looked like she had fallen asleep, two fingers resting gently on the models lips, like a lover saying shush.

Dr. Kim looked to be somewhere in his late forties, with a chubby face and bored looking eyes behind round-rimmed spectacles. Flakes of dandruff peppered the part in his hair, and she thought fleetingly that they must become invisible when they drifted down onto his white overcoat. By the time Min-jung reached the room he was at a hot water dispenser in the corner with his back turned, stirring the contents of a paper cup.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“Uh, yes, sure.”

He handed her the cup. “Hot,” he said, and turned back to the dispenser to prepare another one. “You can have a seat.”

Min-jung complied.

When he had his own steaming drink in hand, sipping at it almost immediately, Kim sat down and pulled his chair in closer to the desk.

“So, what would you like to discuss today?”

“I want eye-widening surgery,” Min-jung said abruptly. “I don’t know what you’d call it, but that’s what I want.”

The doctor studied her for a moment. “I think you mean blepharoplasty,” he said.

Min-jung offered him a blank stare.

“You want double eyelid surgery. It’s common.”

“No.” Min-jung felt a twinge of frustration ignite inside her. “That’s not it. I want an eye widening.”

“I see,” responded Kim colorlessly. “You’re looking for epicanthoplasty in addition to blepharoplasty, then. That’s a reshaping of the inner corners of the eyes. Makes them bigger looking.” He folded his hands on the desk. “But what makes you think we perform that here?”

Min-jung raised the cup of coffee toward her mouth with an unsteady hand. She watched the cooling brown liquid tremble and placed it back down without taking a sip.

“I checked around,” she said. “Online. Forums. It’s been done here at Nu-U before—you just don’t advertise it. I’ve checked other places, all over Gangnam, but they’re out of my current price range. I know you’ll do it cheaper than them.”

Kim didn’t meet her gaze. He appeared to be thinking.

“Well, can you?” Her question bit the air with a sharp, impatient sound, though Min-jung didn’t feel impatient at all. The flesh on her back was crawling like a nest of scorpions.

“We can perform that operation,” Kim replied. “And we do charge less than other clinics. But before y—”

 “Good. Can we set up an appointment then?”

The doctor downed the rest of his coffee in one gulp. When he spoke again he dispelled a wave of sour breath. “I want you to understand that neither of those are surgeries I normally perform. I specialize in the nose and mouth areas.”

“But you’ve done it before.”

“Yes. A few times.”

“That’s fine then,” said Min-jung. “How much will it be?”

“I can’t quote you an exact price at the moment.”

“The appointment then. When can it be done?”

The doctor looked at her quizzically, a glower of insult replacing the dull stoniness that had been in his eyes minutes before.

“I’m a model,” she explained curtly. “I need this done as soon as possible.”

“The nearest opening would be next week.”

“When next week?”

Kim reached across the desk and grabbed a small calendar sitting on Min-jung’s left. He squinted at it. “Wednesday,” he said. “Wednesday at noon. Arrive by 11:30 at the latest, and don’t apply any makeup to the eye area that morning.”

“Okay.”

 The doctor looked like he had more to say, but the decision not to bother passed very visibly across his face, like cloud shadows over a sterile plain. He stood with his arm outstretched toward the door.

“Wednesday,” he said.

Min-jung thanked him and left.

***

She caught a cold that week, and on the weekend it moved into her lungs, tickling at first, then progressing to a wet snuffling sound in her chest when she breathed heavily. The tickle didn’t fade, and she found herself barking sharp involuntary coughs after taking a breath from time to time.

On Sunday morning she made a cup of tea in her and Kwon-jin’s motel room. As she drew a cooling breath in along with her first sip, the wet tickle in her chest came about suddenly and made her cough the mouthful all over her lap and the desk she was sitting at. Kwon-jin asked what the hell was wrong with her and she said nothing, only went into the bathroom with her head down to change into her previous day’s clothes. Kwon-jin didn’t say anything else after that.

The cold started getting better on Monday, but she didn’t attend classes that day. She stayed in her room, drank tea with honey and watched dramas and talent shows on TV. In one of the dramas a girl contracted tuberculosis and had to be hospitalized. Her boyfriend came to her bed every day and brought her one flower each time as she got paler and paler, and kissed her on the forehead before he left. By the time her condition miraculously began to improve there was a bouquet gathered in the vase beside her bed, and when it was announced that she had beaten the illness, tears welled up in her boyfriend’s eyes and spilled down his cheeks. As she watched it, Min-jung realized that she was crying too.

On Tuesday she had her regular shoot at Gwang-su’s new studio. Tonight she was doing full body shots in a pair of high-cut jean shorts and a loose, tissue-thin blouse for an upcoming spring sale promotion. A member of the company’s ad department stood off to the side behind the camera, half seen through the white lights flooding her retinas: a body without head or shoulders, arms folded firmly across the chest.

She opened her eyes wide and looked enticingly into the lens.

“Stop,” Gwang-su said tiredly. “You look scared, for crying out loud. We’re doing those ones again.”

At the end of the shoot, as Min-jung gathered her clothes to head to the bathroom down the hall—she now had a stall to change in—Gwang-su said, “That operation’s tomorrow, mm?”

“Yes,” Min-jung answered.

“Good.”

***

Min-jung arrived at Nu-U at a quarter past 11:00. The receptionist gave her a mechanical half smile and took her name, then dug a waiver out of her desk and slid it across.

“Do you have a pen?” Min-jung asked.

The receptionist sighed and fished a ballpoint pen out of a cup, placing it unceremoniously on the paper.

Min-jung scanned what was written and clicked the back of the pen.

“You can sit down to read it,” the woman said, her attention already diverted back to the computer screen. She tapped away on the keyboard with a smirk playing at the corner of her lips.

Min-jung scribbled her name at the bottom of the sheet. “This is fine.” She slid the paper back to the receptionist with the pen on top, hoping the bitch would simply do her job and take it to file away.

The paper disappeared into a drawer and the pen clinked back into its cup.

“Have a seat.”

She suddenly wished Kwon-jin were there, just to have someone beside her that wasn’t a stranger. She hadn’t seen him since Sunday morning, and hadn’t spoken to him since Monday at lunchtime, when she’d called anxiously to tell him about the operation, which she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do on the weekend. His reaction to the news was one she’d expected, deep down, to receive: indifference and a halfhearted good luck. Still, she wished he were there so she could squeeze his hand.

A few minutes past noon, Dr. Kim came into the waiting area.

“Ms. Cho?” he said, spotting her without hesitation amongst the four others occupying the chairs. “This way, please.”

She stood up, and almost had to catch herself against the arm of a chair. Her legs felt rubbery, like she was nearing the end of a long mountain hike.

He led her into a room at the end of the hall. The walls, ceiling and floor were a stark eggshell white, with a black reclining chair in the center. A monstrous fixture protruded from the ceiling, stretched toward the chair with an insectile compound of lights leering from its head. It didn’t look all that different from a dentist’s office.

Kim ushered for her to sit, and Min-jung nodded absently, staring at the chair’s headrest and envisioning that right above it was where her eyes would be when the doctor began cutting up her lids. She placed her purse below a table nearby, took off her coat and sat down.

He presented her with two oval tablets on a small dish, alongside a cup of water to wash them down with, telling her that they’d calm her central nervous system and help her relax. She swallowed the sedatives eagerly.  

The surgeon pumped a lever with his foot and the back of the chair began to recline by degrees. He left her side for a time, busying himself at a desk in the back corner of the room, telling her she needed some time for the pills to take effect. Her entire upper body was tensed, but in time a calm came over her, mixed with a slight drowsiness that dissolved her frenetic thoughts, and she allowed gravity to draw her into the chair’s cushioning.

Kim returned to her side and unfolded a blue surgical drape. He lay the sterile fabric across her upper body, tugging it with gloved hands up to her neck, then moved to a small table of instruments on wheels and rolled it to the side of the chair. He placed drops into both her eyes, causing a gentle coolness to spread across their surface. He then instructed her to close them, and swabbed her lids with a mildly pungent solution, after which he marked the incisions.

Following the marking, the sharp scent of alcohol reached Min-jung’s nose, and she glanced over to see an assortment of narrow and bladed metal instruments gleaming at her side.

“We’ll anesthetize the surgical area,” Kim was saying.

Min-jung’s gaze went to the doctor as he squirted a thin stream of fluid from a hypodermic needle. He’d already slipped a mask on over his mouth and nose.

“Will this hurt?” she squeaked, suddenly feeling terribly vulnerable.

“Just a couple pricks at the beginning, but after that you shouldn’t feel anything.”

The word shouldn’t flashed bright orange in her head, like the business end of a branding iron, but the drug in her system doused it with warm fuzz and made her fear seem distant and inconsequential.

“Just relax,” said Kim, leaning toward her. “Close your eyes and don’t try to open them again until I say. Take a deep breath and let it out.” He pushed two firm pads to either side of her head. “Stay perfectly still. Long, even breaths.”

He slid the needle into of her right upper lid and injected the contents of the first syringe, then came a second stinging prick further down, closer to the base of her lashes. Min-jung felt the pressure of swelling in that fragile skin, though it faded away to numbness almost as soon as she detected it. Kim repeated the same process on the other eye.

The pressure of the pads against the sides of her head was just enough make her own pulse thud in her ears. She focused on it and tried to slow its soft hammering.

Kim was leaning in close enough for her to feel the heat of his body on her forehead, and there were dull sensations—pushing, tugging and sliding—relayed from the frozen sheet above her eyeballs. It continued for a long time, it seemed. Min-jung tried to keep her breaths as shallow as possible. In the darkness, small explosions of violet light bloomed and disappeared, punctuated by spidery white tendrils, like bursts of chain lightning. Delicate steel clinked from time to time off to her side.

After what felt like a night spent in ethereal gloom, the doctor muttered softly that first eye was finished. He moved on to the second.

This time the work seemed to go slower, and at one point Kim sucked a breath in with a sharp hiss and Min-jung’s heart roared to a gallop in her chest. Suddenly light was flooding into her left eye through a crack, as thin and piercing as a paper cut.

“Calm. Just be calm. I have to pull lid back for a moment.”

Min-jung rolled her eyes away from stinging brightness, safely into the reddish black. Her pulse thundered in her ears like the reverberations of a bass drum, the force seeming to rock her entire head. Distantly, yet worriedly, she wondered if the sedatives were wearing off already.

Calm, calm, little breaths, little heart beats.

She made her breathing shallower and shallower—so shallow that her legs began to itch, but that was fine. Just fine. She could manage.

“A little more,” Kim droned against his mask. His voice hummed deeply in her ears, his mouth now sounded almost kissing distance away.

The lid slid open higher, and now Min-jung’s pupil couldn’t escape the light. Kim’s face came blearily into view, partly obscured by his gloved hand. There were streaks of red on it.

“Calm,” he bade her again, firmly. For a second his own eyes slid down to meet Min-jung’s one, and in that moment the burning in her legs became too much. She needed to take a breath—one good long breath. She opened her mouth and sucked warm air in steadily, tasting like latex and that ever-present stench of antiseptic.

It all happened very quickly after that. There was a sharp tickle in her lungs, like a ghost of her sickness from days before, pulling itself with vindictive speed into existence one final time, and before her mind could fully process this, her chest heaved in compression to force out a single, explosive cough. Her head shot upward, not further than the length of a fingernail, not much at all, but enough to have the tempered steel tip of the lancet, poised gently against her lid, driven just that far into her eye.

There was less than a second during which the light above her burst into the glow of the noonday sun, then a pain shot into her skull more intense than anything she’d ever known—more intense than she’d ever thought any pain could feel. Everything in her head felt like it was boiling and tearing itself apart.

She hadn’t screamed yet, but far away she could make out the sound of Kim moaning, “No, no, no . . .”

Her other eye had somehow sprung open and everything was red and black and blurry. She lay there, slipping into a state of shock, already telling herself that nothing in this moment was what it seemed.

 “Oh no, oh nononono . . .”

Something wet had made its way down to her front lip. Mucus? It spilled into her open mouth. She tasted it on her tongue. It was oily and salty.

There was a volcano in her left socket now, the agony an inferno, exploding in all directions—up, down and out to the sides. It was erupting a sea of silver daggers.

Nothing was what it seemed. The lancet hadn’t broken through the lens of her eye like a knife popping through the skin of a grape. Her eyeball fluid wasn’t leaking out and down her face. And she sure wasn’t going to be half blind—sure as hell not. No.

Nononononono.

***

The eye was ruined.

When her three-day stay at the hospital was nearing its end and it was confirmed that the antibiotics were doing their job, a man Min-jung had never met, who identified himself as a legal agent for Nu-U, showed up at her bedside with a copy of the waiver she’d signed. Her hasty signature was very much there in ink at the bottom. The man had brought a photocopy with certain paragraphs highlighted in neon marker. He handed her both copies and directed her remaining eye to what had been picked out for her in the compact mass of bullet points.

“You confirm that it was agreed by both parties that the fault of any accident resulting from the patient’s personal and sudden instability during the surgery process would rest on the patient and not the doctor performing the operation, as defined in the waiver, section two, part one?”

Min-jung gazed blankly at the sea of words.

The representative leaned over and tapped gently at the relevant passage.

“Yes,” she said.

Everything was flatter now—the representative standing before her in his black suit and necktie fit to choke, the walls, the doorway and the hallway beyond. It was all just flat, one big sheet of paper curled around her; one wide, wide waiver.

She’d fainted for the first time in her life while she was in the hospital bed, after they put the bandage over the socket. She hadn’t fainted lying on the chair in the Nu-U clinic, even though she’d heard of people fainting from pain before. She thought it would happen, and a part of her expected it in that first interminable minute, and finally she only hoped for it, and prayed silently to any god that might be listening to deliver her from knowing and feeling.

She’d been put out—blessed unconsciousness, finally—while they removed the punctured remains of the eye. They explained to her that it was blind, dead, and that it had to be taken out before infection could set in. The rawness of that pain had subsided now, though soreness still thrummed deep behind the hollow round hole in her skull, shrouded by a curtain of damaged eyelid.

Still, she’d fainted for the first time in her life here, and it had happened when she thought about calling her parents. She saw them standing in the living room. Her mother would be holding the phone to her ear, her father would be sitting on a couch waiting for news, and when Min-jung’s tear-choked voice came over the line, her mother’s face would change and her father would rise to his feet with worry etched across his own. Then she would tell them, and in the silence immediately following, when they knew not only how but why she had ended up with only one eye, she would sense their disappointment and sorrow and disgust, and the questions they would never speak aloud to anyone, not even each other, of how their flesh and blood could have gone so wrong. She’d fainted with a mental image of her mother’s face staring down at her, as it had when she was still a little girl that wanted nothing more than to please her mom, burning in the black eternity that had flooded into what had once been half her sight.

***

At first she couldn’t believe how realistic the glass eye was, its details matching her natural one almost perfectly. It fit well against the carefully preserved orbital tissue, and so was able to move in tandem with her other eye to a good degree. Staring into the mirror provided for her, blinking often, she noticed that the prosthetic didn’t catch the light quite like her real one, nor did the pupil dilate or contract, but, tamping down on the sob that rose in her throat, she decided it was close enough. No one would be watching her face as intensely as she herself was doing.

Her eyelid had healed well enough. The microfilament stitches had done their job well, with only a light pink scar left behind, and for now Min-jung was amazed with how easily the lid slid over the new eye. She went home from the ocularist’s office, where they’d showed her how to insert and remove the prosthesis, finally without a patch on her face but hardly used to the idea that she looked somewhat normal again. She shrank at the thought, however, of looking someone in the eyes at close range. On the subway, the street, and even in the taxi, she kept her face down and trained on the screen of her phone, half reading old outgoing text messages over and over.

She hadn’t heard from Kwon-jin for weeks, and had seen him only a few times in the months since the accident. He was busy these days, always busy busy busy. But that was okay, Min-jung reminded herself—she hadn’t really wanted to see him, or anyone else, after the removal of the blinded eye and the subsequent healing process.

Two days later, she returned to Gwang-su’s studio for the first time since the surgery. She arrived at her regular scheduled hour in the evening, after a brief call ahead. Gwang-su hadn’t sounded enthused, offering her his listless acquiescence.

She found the photographer alone. The studio was dark and he appeared to be running tests on some of the lights. Two of those lights, she noticed, were new. Gwang-su was fiddling with the intensity on one of them. A brown teddy bear with a tartan hat and a red heart embroidered on its belly sat alone on the bench in front of the green screen. The camera flashed periodically on a timer.

“Wait,” he said, giving her a sideways glance when he noticed her presence, and continued to work on the light for a few more minutes. Min-jung stood in the outlying gloom, clutching her purse to her chest.

When Gwang-su was finished he went to the bench and grabbed the teddy, chucking it to the floor at the foot of the tripod. Min-jung could see a picture of the bear displayed on the camera’s screen. It looked washed out.

“Yes?” he asked, stepping toward her. His face fell into the shadows.

Min-jung bristled. “I wanted to come talk to you.”

“Yeah, what about?”

“About modeling. I want to continue my work here.”

Gwang-su was silent. His mouth worked behind his lips, as if he were chewing his next words. “You had an accident,” he said finally.

The room felt very cold, drafty, even though Min-jung could hear the rattle of the heater in the ceiling. “Yes,” she said, “I had an accident.” Indignation wriggled inside her, so deep it might as well have been a creature in the Mariana Trench—one that would never be brought to the surface alive.

“Come here,” said Gwang-su, and shuffled backward past the camera, into the flood of light washing over the set. His features were laid bare with stunning nakedness—the stray patches of wiry hair on his neck, the dimpled scars of acne and his waiting, strangely hungry eyes. He beckoned disjointedly with his hand when Min-jung didn’t move.

She came closer, still clutching the purse as though it were a shield, past the black hulk of the camera and out of the dark. There was no question about where Gwang-su’s stare was trained. He sighed pointedly.

“I don’t have to do portraits!” Min-jung burst out. Her bottom lip was trembling. “I can do full body shots, or just body shots. It doesn’t have to be on my face. If I have to go to part time, that’s okay.”

“It’s not that simple,” Gwang-su said. “Close your eyes for a moment.”

Min-jung complied.

Gwang-su sucked some breath in through his teeth. “Open.”

“That will fade.”

“It’s not going to work.”

Her mouth fell open. “What?” The word sounded tiny and juvenile.

“It’s not going to work,” Gwang-su repeated. “The clients, they don’t want that. They need the face too—that’s why I wanted you to have wide eyes, Min-jung. You remember that?”

“Please,” she choked out. “Give me a chance, please . . .”

“It’s time for you to go,” he informed her calmly.

Footsteps clicked in the hall. The knob turned on the door. Min-jung stared helplessly into Gwang-su’s face. He wasn’t looking at her, just at the teddy on the floor, and then the camera, as if impatient to check the trial shots he’d taken.

“Saturday night,” he said lowly, examining the lens.

“What?”

“Come Saturday night, after eight.” His voice hovered just above a whisper.

The door had opened softly behind them. Min-jung turned around, her eye readjusting to the dark. Whoever was coming in was just a silhouette in the doorway against the hall lights, but it was very much a female.

The crisp click of high heels came across the floor, and suddenly the studio felt very long and narrow.

The figure cocked its head to the side. “Min-jung!” it cried in syrupy surprise, nearing the light; the outline of a beautiful face, with glimmering eyes and blood red lips.

Click, click, clack.

A silver ring through the eyebrow. A mini-skirt over black leggings. Long, sensual legs—the legs men got hard to and fantasized with delicious longing about spreading. Legs she despised.

Min-jung stepped into the dark toward her, keeping her back to the light.

“Sun-woo,” she said. “Hello.”

“Nice surprise to see you here!” Sun-woo gushed.

Small fucking world, thought Min-jung.

“I started doing some modeling here with Kwon-jin’s friend. Isn’t that great? I hear you’ve been doing some too.”

“Oh you heard that, hmm?”

“Yup.” She faced Min-jung head on in the dark, an arm’s length of space between them. “How have you been?”

Min-jung regarded her with disgust.

Something in Sun-woo’s expression changed and her plastic smile started to fade. She shifted her feet with a soft click. “And . . . I hear you had a bit of an accident,” she said.

“Oh yes,” Min-jung replied, mimicking the girl’s spun-sugar innocuousness. “Just a little one.”

Discomfort crawled into Sun-woo’s lovely face, as though she’d stepped into an elevator where someone had recently vomited.

“You wanna touch it?” Min-jung asked.

“Touch . . . touch what?” Sun-woo was still trying vainly to smile, but had taken an awkward side step toward where Gwang-su was hunched over the camera, as if to say she really had to be on her way. Min-jung turned to face her again and knew the light was catching her features. She tapped on the glass eye with a long, unpainted nail. It clinked loudly in her head.

Sun-woo remained composed for a moment, and then retched. Her hand flew to her mouth and the expression above it became one reserved for growling dogs and bad vehicle accidents on the side of the road.

“Problem?” Min-jung asked sweetly.

“I’m sorry,” Sun-woo said through the hand still clamped over her mouth.

“I’ll see you later.”
Min-jung walked slowly toward the door, fighting an urge to flee toward it. “Saturday,”

she called back to Gwang-su, who didn’t reply.

She made it to the hall before she began to wheeze with the screech building inside her, gulping air to force it back down. In the stairwell she made it to the first landing, then leaned against the wall and whimpered. Getting hold of herself she pushed off again, teeth clenched, and ran down the stairs as quickly as possible, stumbling twice and having to catch herself on the railing. Outside the air was warm and moist with spring, but she still felt cold and dry. A tundra chill blew through her body and she shook like broken wind chimes with anger and hate and jealousy.

At home she marched into the bathroom and stared hard at her reflection, making sure the glass eye was facing straight. She didn’t care in that instant whether it moved the rest of the time, but it had to look straight on when the other was.

“You’re disgusting,” she said to the mirror.

Her reflection appeared to be too stupid to know what this meant. A big, double-lidded eye looked back at her from one side, and a smaller misshapen one stared out from the other, vacuously doll-like.

“You’re disgusting.”

She didn’t watch her reflected mouth as she spoke, just the eyes—they held such hurt, both of them, and she was happy to see it. They were getting just what they deserved. Tomorrow they could pretend they were beautiful again, but tonight they were reaping what insults they’d sown in their imperfection.

She would let them reap it all.

***

Min-jung hadn’t gone to class for the month leading up to her glass eye fitting, unable to further endure the sidelong glances at the gauzy eye patch, and she didn’t return now. She stayed in her room during the day watching dramas on TV until she could take the unblemished faces and perfect on-screen love no longer. After that she would surf the internet and write emails to old friends from high school without ever hitting send.

Late on Friday morning she wrote a text to Kwon-jin beneath the covers of her bed: I hate you. Don’t ever try to see me again. She sent it, but received no reply that day or any other after.

She stopped going to the dorm cafeteria, with its busy tables, chatter and masses of roving eyes on eager faces. She instead bought groceries—crackers and cereals—and stayed in her room where she rationed them until her stomach maintained a hungry, gnawing growl.

She thought about calling her parents many times. They called once a week as it was, and each call was a short, bland mesh of silence punctuated by small talk that died a few moments after it began.

On Saturday night, at eight o’clock sharp, she arrived at Gwang-su’s studio. There were more lights on than last time, but still the place seemed mired in insipid gloom. Gwang-su was not alone—two large men and a leaner, shorter one with a thin beard and narrow face were there as well. When she walked in, their low conversation died like a candle flame blown out by a draft. They all turned to look at her, falling silent. Min-jung forcefully drew her lips into a cheerless smile.

“Hello,” she said, bowing slightly.

“Hi,” Gwang-su said.

The two larger men said nothing, but the shorter one, not much taller than Min-jung, greeted her with a small bow of his own.

“Miss Cho?” he asked.

“Yes.”

The man nodded and continued to stare at her.

She waited for Gwang-su to say something. He had his hands in his pockets and was watching the thin, bearded man carefully.

“Okay then,” the man said after a few moments. There was nothing tender in his expression.

“Okay?” Gwang-su asked, as if confirming a half-heard word. He waggled his fingers for Min-jung to come.

As she drew close to him, his face took on an exasperated look.

“The set, go onto the set,” he said, pointing at the bench. Tonight it had a white lace covering over it that had never been there before. She slipped off her shoes, went to the bench and turned around.

The two large men were watching, one of them with his arms folded. Boredom was stamped on their pudgy faces.

“You can have a seat over there if you want,” Gwang-su said to them, wringing his hands as though for warmth. He pointed to two wooden chairs against the wall.

One of the men sighed loudly and the other grunted something. They made their way to chairs and sat down heavily. Gwang-su fiddled with the camera lens, watching the display screen closely.

The bearded man was standing with his hands on his hips. “I’m Mr. Jang,” he said. “I’ll direct the shoot tonight.”

Gwang-su finished his adjustments and nodded to Jang, who didn’t acknowledge him.

“How old are you, Miss Cho?”

“Nineteen.”

“Ah . . .”

Jang turned to Gwang-su, who was now walking toward the back of the room. “Are we ready, Mr. Choe?”

Gwang-su replied in the affirmative and flicked the light switches next to the door, plunging the room into near-darkness. One of the set lights shone dimly, bathing Min-jung in an orange, paper-lantern glow. All at once she felt like a player about to begin the first act on a small and lonely stage. Gwang-su returned and bent to his panel of switches on the floor. The lights burst into their full, white glow, and in their glare Jang became one of the headless bodies that watched from safely out of the camera’s reach.

Min-jung sat, Jang’s face swimming into view as her pupil shrunk. She turned her head to fix the camera with her good eye.

“What are you doing? Don’t do that.”

She turned to face the unblinking lens head on again, and wondered with a tremor of panic whether the glass eye was still facing perfectly straight. She could feel Jang’s stare running over her like spider legs.

“Stand up, I didn’t ask you to sit yet,” said Jang, interrupting her thoughts. “Pan the camera up a bit,” he added to Gwang-su. “There.”

Min-jung stood.

“Good, just stop there.”

Min-jung waited, frozen in place where she was, and she wondered for the first time why she hadn’t been given any clothes to change into.

Jang had his hand to his chin and was looking at her contemplatively. Gwang-su had stopped peering into the camera’s view screen, its glow lighting the bottom of his face and stretching the shadows of his features upward. He now appeared to be looking at the bare floor in front of Min-jung’s feet. The two large men, who she hadn’t heard get up out of their chairs, came swaggering quietly back into view. They loomed in the background, watching.

“Good,” Jang said again hollowly. “Now take off your coat, please.”

Min-jung complied. It was a button-up coat and as she undid the buttons she found her fingers slipping off them. It felt like her hands were in another world far away, and it took time for her orders to reach them. When all the buttons had been slipped free of their holes, she shrugged the coat off and held it questioningly in one hand.

“Put it off to the side,” said Jang, nodding toward the edge of the set.

Min-jung went to the border of the green screen and set her jacket in the dark, wishing she could crawl out there and curl up in it, safe from attention. She tried to keep from shivering as she came back to the center, but before she reached it Jang’s voice droned again from in front of her.

“And the blouse.”

“What?” Min-jung heard herself say, and she watched Jang’s expression contort into one of frustration. The two big men drew up closer to the set. Jang’s attention shifted for a blessed second and he turned his gaze on Gwang-su, eyes boring holes in the air. Gwang-su remained stone-like and continued to look at the floor. His mouth had tightened to a white scar across his face.

“Son of a bitch,” Jang cursed under his breath. He rolled his eyes disgustedly. When his attention shifted back to Min-jung again, his features softened, but it was a conscious and losing effort, like trying to smooth a sheet over a bed a stones. “Listen, we’ll pay you 200,000 won for the shoot tonight. Two-fifty next time. That sound good to you? What’s this guy been giving you? Thirty, 40,000 an hour?” He snickered bitterly.

Min-jung didn’t move. Her eye flicked to the two big men watching this little show.

“They can go,” Jang said convivially. He turned to the men. “Go take a seat,” he said, waving them off. One gave Min-jung a sardonic glance before heading back to the chairs. “200,000 tonight,” Jang repeated. “That’s good pay.”

Min-jung’s mind was blanking. It felt like things were loosening around her, coming undone, as if she were caught up in a dream and somewhere beyond it all the morning sun was breaking through the window to draw her away. That’s how it had to be, because that’s how these things finally came to their end. Somewhere right now morning beams were playing over her face.

“I know this isn’t what you wanted,” Jang was saying. “But trust me, you won’t be a model with those eyes. They’re not quite right anymore. The camera sees that.”

Min-jung’s lips began to tremble.

“Aw, come on now,” he soothed. His face was wolfish, teeth gleaming in little flashes behind his lips. “It’s nothing to get all sad over. This’ll make you lots more money too.”

Min-jung sniffed and her lip trembled more. Her real eye grew moist, and the glass felt hot. She looked at Jang pleadingly. Gwang-su stared into nothing with near catatonic stillness, waiting for the outcome, and only Jang was left to hear her, to speak to her.

“You just take off your clothes for a little while, then it’s over. We’re going to blur your face after, so no one’ll know it’s you. Promise.”

“Okay,” Min-jung said weakly. A single tear squeezed itself out of her bottom lid and trickled down her face. Beyond that word and that tear it was all static, just a long, long tunnel of white noise.

“200,000, sweetheart. It’s good money. Now take off your blouse.”

There were more buttons than on her coat and they were much smaller. It seemed to take her a long time to undo them all.

When she was finished the material hung slack, like two stage curtains over her front, with a strip of bare flesh running from her neck to the waist of her jeans, punctuated by the white of her bra.

“Off,” Jang cooed. He’d drawn closer, standing next to the camera as though it were some hideous alien pet.

Min-jung slipped the blouse off and held it in one hand. The air raised goose flesh on her arms. Gwang-su watched her now, close-mouthed, his nostrils flaring in and out.

“The bra,” Jang said.

Min-jung looked off to the side, wondering only if she should go set the blouse down with the coat to free up her hand.

“The bra,” Jang said again, louder this time, the frost settling back into his voice.

Min-jung didn’t break her gaze to the side. The tunnel stretched off in that direction too—it was all emptiness beyond the rumpled form of her coat, the one her father had given her as a graduation present a year before, and it went on and on and on.

“The bra!” Jang snapped.

Min-jung dropped the blouse to the floor and her hands floated up behind her. She undid the clasps of the strap and the cups fell away from her breasts. Her nipples were hard with the cold—it was so very, very cold—and the areolas were contracted and bumpy. She wondered if they would say it was ugly. The camera saw those things.

“Ah, good girl, good girl,” Jang chimed.

Beautiful. She was beautiful. It was good.

“Look up, look at the camera.”

She brought her face up slowly.

“Smile, for crying out loud!”

She pulled her lips into a grin.

“Not the teeth.”

She closed her lips.

“There you go.”

The camera flashed.

“Touch your nipple.” Jang held up his thumb and index finger in a pinching gesture. “Like this.”

Min-jung raised her hand to her breast.

“You’re having fun,” Jang informed her. “Smile when you’re having fun.”

The camera flashed. It flashed again and again. The flashes were the light of this place—the only light of the tunnel—warmth and love and soft caresses.

“You like this, don’t you. Yes, you like it. Say that you like it.”

“I like it,” Min-jung told him.

“Then smile.”

Soon he told her to take off her pants, as she knew he would, and then her underwear. She was shivering badly by that time, but it seemed of little consequence. Soon she would have that 200,000 won in hand and be on her way home, and next time she could do it all again for even more. She was a model and the people loved to look at her. They paid to look at her, and for her to smile at them from the photo.

When Jang told her to sit on the bench with her legs parted, she did it, and when he told her to slip a finger into herself, she did that too. There was no sensation, except for a numb suggestion of ice entering her body. She smiled and looked into the camera, and she knew they weren’t really going to censor her face.

The camera flashed in the incredible dark spread before her, a dark that had eaten Jang’s body, and Gwang-su, and everything else out there, the burst catching her in its split-second embrace; then the next one would come, just as warm and inviting, beckoning for her to come, come—just a little further.

Min-jung stared forward, wide-eyed without thinking about it anymore. The flashes came and she went toward them.