The K-Pop Idol in the Jungle

Part One — Where Nobody Laughs

Rain hammered the tin roof.

Goyo was writing up a chart beneath the sound. A squall always arrived in order: first the sound — leaves flipping over one ridge at a time across the river — then the smell of wet earth rising off the yard, and only then the roof. Every evening before the monsoon, the jungle ran this same rehearsal. Her pen didn’t stop. Quarantine wing, No. 11. Female, estimated four years old. Three weeks since confiscation. Appetite normal. Still hides in the corner when humans approach — a good sign. An orangutan had to know how to fear people before it could go back to the forest.

On the corner of the desk sat an envelope. Foundation logo on the flap, sitting in the exact same spot for days now, ever since she’d opened it. Notice: renewal review schedule. Goyo was practicing not looking at it. The practice was not going well.

The jungle was never quiet. People heard the word remote and imagined silence, but night at Teduh was louder than a city at noon. Frogs built the bass layer, insects filled the middle, and above it all cried birds she knew and birds she didn’t. Goyo loved this noise. It was the sound of living things, and living things asked nothing of her.

The radio crackled.

“Goyo.” Bayu’s voice, half shredded by the rain. “Lights at the dock. A lot of them.”

She set down her pen.

“A boat?”

“No. They’re walking. Along the river.” Static. “…Seven, eight of them, maybe.”

At this hour. In this rain. On foot. Goyo pulled on her rain jacket and already knew the answer. She’d heard it at the Lipas market — people had gone in upriver a few days back. A Korean TV crew, they said. Some jungle show. The woman at the general store had chattered about it, thrilled; Goyo had paid for her eggs and turned away.

TV.

The word still snagged somewhere at the base of her throat. Five years, and it still did.

She stepped into the yard and the rain drummed her jacket. Flashlight beams wobbled up the path from the dock. The people under them looked half boiled in mud. Backpacks, waterproof cases, one broken umbrella. The man in front spotted her and waved both arms.

“A person! Hey! You’re a real person, right?”

“Keep your voice down,” Goyo said. “The kids are sleeping.”

The man froze with his mouth open. Pushing forty, and even soaked through, something oily about him refused to rinse off. When he started digging inside his rain jacket for a business card, she stopped him with one hand. A wet business card was just future trash.

“Na Seon-uk. I’m with a production company — we were shooting upstream and the mountain came down. Half the camp’s buried, the equipment — I mean, everyone’s alive, everyone’s fine.” He caught his breath. “It’s just, on the map, this is the only roof.”

“And the river?”

“Swollen. No boats tonight, according to — that gentleman there.” He pointed into the dark behind him. Bayu had appeared at the bottom of the path at some point and stood in the rain wearing his usual expression, which was neither angry nor not angry.

Goyo counted wet people. Seven. Eight. And then a ninth came up last.

That one wore the most mud of anybody. Head to toe, as if someone had rolled him down the mountain on purpose. But his walk was wrong. It wasn’t the walk of an exhausted man. It was the walk of a man taking a stage. He stepped into the light of the yard, grinned through the mud, and said — timing polished to the half beat —

“Wow… an actual jungle resort. Five stars. You check in, the mud spa’s free.”

A few of the staff behind him laughed, exhausted. Less a laugh than a reflex. The body’s old habit: this man says a thing, and we laugh.

Goyo did not laugh.

Not because she knew the face. Though she did know it — from the TV in the Lipas general store, from the boatman’s son’s phone, from the catchphrases the village kids traded like currency. Jae-i, of CHROMA. The funny one. According to the kids, the funniest man alive. On screen he was always doing something — falling, firing back, folding his face, flipping a whole room upside down. Goyo had seen the clips. She had never laughed once.

Goyo hadn’t laughed in five years.

More precisely: whenever a laugh rose in her, she swallowed a breath instead. The habit was automatic now, cardiac, so much a part of her that she only ever discovered a laugh had risen after she’d already swallowed it. Five years ago, cameras had killed something in this very yard. And then the world had laid her laughing face on top of that death. Since then, the house had a rule, and she had a habit.

“House rules.” She addressed all nine of them. She didn’t raise her voice, and yet it carried strangely well through the rain. “One. Every camera goes to me. Phones get tape over the lenses. You’ll have it all back when you leave tomorrow.”

“Ma’am, if you knew what this equipment costs—” Na Seon-uk began.

“Two,” Goyo said, stepping straight over the sentence. “No loud noises. Laughing, being funny — do it at low volume. This isn’t a guesthouse, it’s closer to a hospital. Three. You get the mess hall and the storage barn, nothing else. And not one finger past the wire fence.”

“And if we don’t like it?” a staffer asked, half joking.

“The river’s right there.”

Nobody chose the river.

While blankets went down on the mess hall floor and wet people claimed their patches of it, Goyo stood at the door and counted heads again. Eight. The ninth was still outside. He was lining up the shoes — nine muddy lumps of them — under the eaves, one pair at a time, toes pointing out. Nobody had asked him to. He clearly thought nobody was watching. Toes out: the direction that’s easiest to slip into on your way out. A hand doing the math for tomorrow morning on nine pairs of strangers’ shoes. It was the first time she saw the loud man’s quiet hands, and because it was the first time, she let it go. One data point isn’t data.

The waterproof camera cases piled up one by one at her feet. She carried them to the cabinet at the back of the barn and clicked the padlock shut. Her hands were fine. Her hands were always fine; the part of her that wasn’t fine was somewhere else.

The phones came past her next, and each lens got its small square of black tape. Her hands moved with such practiced economy that one staffer said, without thinking, “You’ve done this a lot,” and caught an elbow from the person beside him. She had done this a lot. For five years, though hardly anyone ever visited, the black tape had lived in the front compartment of the top drawer. That is a location known only to someone who was, once, too late.

As the wet crowd collapsed onto the mess hall floor, the muddiest man — Jae-i — was pulling off his shoes at the doorway when his foot found the moss on the wooden step. His whole body went airborne. It was the kind of drop that lands an ordinary person on the back of the skull, but he twisted mid-air somehow, and even while failing the landing entirely, spread both arms into a bow. Flat on his back in the mud.

“…I’m fine. Ten out of ten.”

The mess hall snickered.

Goyo swallowed a breath.

Only after she’d swallowed it did she realize something had risen. She folded that fact up, put it away, and turned to fetch a rag and the first aid kit. Behind her she heard the man getting up, the staff laughing again at the state of him, and then his voice — dutifully lowered a full register — still, somehow, adding a punch line. Told to keep it down, he was now being funny quietly. A diligent man, Goyo thought. In an alarming direction.

When she handed over the antiseptic, he looked up at her. Up close he was younger than the screen, and more tired than the screen. His elbow was scraped raw.

“Thank you. Seriously,” he said. And then, riding the tail of the sentence, entirely naturally, the next bit was already arriving: “You know I came here to film a survival show? And now you’re the one saving my life, so technically this is a broadcasting accident—”

“You don’t have to be funny.”

His mouth stopped, open.

“Disinfect your elbow.” She set the kit down beside him and stood.

The noise of the mess hall receded behind her. At the door, Goyo looked back once. The man was sitting exactly where she’d left him, the first aid kit untouched in front of him. The face that had not stopped moving since the moment he entered the light was, for the first time, perfectly still. It was a face she hadn’t seen on any screen, in the yard, or in the mud. The face of a man looking down at the spot where his joke had fallen out of the air. Whether it was the face of something breaking or the face of a man taking his first full breath, she couldn’t read.

A joke from the man who had made half a peninsula laugh had just dropped, for the first time, into total nothing.

The rain filled in the silence where it landed.

The morning jungle woke you with birdsong. More precisely: with something far too large to be called birdsong, wailing on the roof like the world was ending.

Jae-i opened his eyes on the mess hall floor, spent about three seconds not knowing where he was, and then yesterday came back all at once.

The sound of the mountain coming down. Not a sound so much as a vibration. The ridge behind camp had slid whole, swallowing the light tower, the generator, and half the main tent. Every person had made it out fine. Episode one of Jae-i Goes Jungle had not. Only the mountain knew where the case with the hard drives was buried.

It was his first solo show.

Not CHROMA’s Jae-i — just Jae-i. The first program with the team’s name wiped off and his own name alone in the title. In the pitch meeting, Na Seon-uk had said, “Add up your clip views and you’ve got a bigger audience than most variety shows. It’s time you stood alone.” Stood alone. The cold that had slid down the inside of his throat at those words, Jae-i had covered with a laugh. The way he always did.

The night he’d told the members, the reactions had been perfectly in character. Rubin launched off the sofa yelling “Hyung, finally!” Eun-gyeol clapped his shoulder — “That’s great, really.” Sion nodded once, which by Sion standards was a twenty-one-gun salute. Only Dohan asked, half a beat late: “Is it what you want?” Jae-i had answered in a tenth of a second. “Obviously, hyung. First game with my own name on it.” That the answer had come too fast — that it was less an answer than a reflex — that his hyung’s eyes had lingered a moment longer — Jae-i had noticed all of it, and pretended not to. What you want, what you should do, and what you’re afraid you’ll disappear without: to a man who had never once told those three apart, the question was a foreign language.

Inside the mess hall, the staff were inventorying wet equipment. A list of what survived and what died. Beside them sat Jae-i’s suitcase, wide open — the expedition’s sole survivor, miraculously pulled alive from the mudslide.

The problem was its contents.

“Hyung.” The junior writer peered inside. “What is all this?”

“Jungle look,” Jae-i said. “My stylist packed it overnight. It’s an editorial concept.”

Suede boots. Five linen shirts, all white. Something closer to an award-show hat than a safari hat. Not one item was waterproof. In a single day, two white shirts had died in action, and the suede boots had drunk enough water to double in size — less footwear now than dough.

“I saw it on a variety show,” Jae-i said, holding up the dough. “They said leather’s what you want in the jungle. Snakes can’t bite through it.”

“Hyung, you said that. Two years ago. It was in the script.”

“……So it was.”

A low laugh rolled through the mess hall. Jae-i collected it automatically, on reflex — boots on his head, it’s a hat now, a second life for a shoe even God abandoned, and so on. The laugh got a little bigger. In the doorway, the expressionless woman wringing out a rag glanced over once, then went back to the rag.

The woman from last night.

You don’t have to be funny.

The words had hung all night on some strange hook inside him. He’d heard versions of it plenty. Take a break. This isn’t a stage. You don’t have to be on. Kind people said it kindly, and so it never weighed anything. But last night’s version hadn’t been kindness. It was a statement of fact. A notice: that function is not in service at this location. Like a sign taped up during a power outage.

“Jae-i.” Na Seon-uk came over, lowering the satellite phone. “They’re taking us out in two boat runs. Water’s dropped a little. You’re on the first boat.”

“And the show?”

For a moment, the producer’s face ran the quick arithmetic particular to TV people. “Let’s talk once we’re back in Seoul.”

Jae-i knew what let’s talk in Seoul meant. He was eight years in. It was the first nail in the coffin lid. The slot slips, the slipped slot vanishes, and the vanished slot becomes an article. Jae-i’s first solo show, postponed indefinitely. And under the article, the comments would bloom, satisfied — knew he couldn’t do it alone.

“Before I board — bathroom real quick.” Jae-i stood up, smiling.

He didn’t go to the bathroom. He circled behind the mess hall and crouched under the eaves. The rain had stopped and the yard was steaming. A smell rising off wet earth and wet leaves — a smell Seoul didn’t have. Beyond the wire fence, up in a tree, an orange ball of fur was watching him. A young orangutan. Jae-i waved. The fur ball recoiled in horror and vanished behind the leaves.

“Hey, I’m a popular guy,” Jae-i muttered. “You’re passing up a signed—”

He stopped himself mid-sentence.

He was doing the bit with nobody there. His entire audience was foliage.

The phone in his pocket buzzed. The satellite Wi-Fi had miraculously caught a bar, and the texts poured in all at once. Twelve from Seung-mo-hyung — confirm you’re safe, press response, schedule triage. Rubin: hyung are you alive? if you’re dead, text back. He texted back asking how exactly a dead man texts back, and got oh good you’re alive within the second. Eun-gyeol: Saw the news. Health first. Sion: a single period. In Sion-ese, a single period was a long letter. It asked if he was safe, was glad he was safe, and had more to say that it refused to say over text — all of it compressed into one dot. Live with someone eight years and you become fluent. And then, Dohan.

Saw the news. No one’s hurt — that’s what matters.

Don’t force your way back.

Your schedule was already cleared through next month anyway. Whatever happens with the show — take your sabbatical there.

The last text had arrived three minutes later, on its own.

That’s an order from your hyung.

Jae-i looked at that line for a long time.

The sabbatical month. The clause Dohan had bled for at the contract renewal two years ago. Last year the hyung had used it first — and had come back from that Iceland a changed man, with a woman to prove it — and now he was telling Jae-i to use it. That was the hyung all over. Whatever had been good for him, he returned to the team, without fail.

The problem was that Jae-i didn’t know how to rest.

Resting meant doing nothing; doing nothing meant it got quiet; and when it got quiet — Jae-i’s body had a rule. Before a silence hits three seconds, throw something. Anything. Three seconds. That was the tripwire. On a broadcast, a three-second hole was a technical failure. At a company dinner, a three-second hole meant somebody was boring. At the dorm, a three-second hole meant — he didn’t actually know what it meant, because he had never let one happen. He didn’t want to know. It went back to the trainee years. A sixteen-year-old who was mediocre at dancing and mediocre at singing had survived the monthly evaluations exactly one way: by making the judges laugh. Be funny, and you stay. Fail, and you pack your room. Eight years at the top of the industry had not erased that equation from his body.

“Jae-i! Boat’s here!”

The call came up from the dock. Jae-i stood. There was mud on the seat of his pants; he was brushing it off when his hand stopped.