The K-Pop Idol Under the Northern Lights

Part One — The Edge of the World

The wind slammed against the lighthouse.

Jieum was listening to it. More precisely, she was recording it. On the old console the needle of the level meter swung with the grain of the wind. Twenty meters a second, give or take. The window glass moaned, woom, as if it might be pushed out from the inside. People called nights like this frightening. To Jieum, a night like this was inventory. A night when a sound that existed nowhere else in the world came knocking at the door for free — a night that came only a few times a year.

Inside her headphones, the whole fjord was breathing.

Winter in Eyra gave you about three and a half hours of sun. Once those three and a half hours were gone, the world was nothing but black volcanic sand, white snow, gray sea, and the dark that erased all three. No color. That was why Jieum had come all the way out here. A place with no color. A place where no one expected anything of her. Six years ago, as far as she could get from the city where every color in the world had been pointing its finger at her.

Viti had been the lighthouse keeper’s quarters. A hundred years ago, the house where the man who turned the lamp at the end of the headland had lived. Now the lamp turned on its own, and the quarters had become a recording studio. Her mentor had made it that way. A man who had fled the loudest city in the world for the quietest place in it, who had moved an analog console and a tape machine into these thick stone walls and split the booth from the control room with a single pane of glass. Once, musicians from all over the world had come to this far edge to record. Now no one came. The mentor was dead, and Jieum was what remained, and when spring came the place would be sold.

She looked through the glass wall. In the center of the empty booth, a single microphone stood in the dark. No one had stood in front of it in a long time.

The door sounded.

Not the wind. The wind had rules. This had none. Three times, a pause, then two more. A human hand.

Jieum slid her headphones down to her neck. She didn’t need to look at her watch to know. Four in the afternoon, and already pitch dark. It was not a time for guests at Viti. In winter, Viti had no guests. The guesthouse had closed in October, and the nearest town with a departing ferry was an hour off even before a storm. And the storm was already coming. All afternoon the barometer had been falling. Jieum’s ears were more accurate than any barometer — the low overtone of the wind had dropped about a half-step.

Jón?

No. Jón didn’t knock. Jón just walked in and asked whether there was coffee.

Jieum got up and left the control room. A short corridor, and at its end, a heavy oak door. The door of a lighthouse keeper’s quarters was built to weather a hundred years of storms, so it was heavy. When she threw the bolt and pulled it open, the sound of the outside poured in all at once. Snow flew sideways.

A man stood there.

One suitcase. A black padded coat. Inside the hood, a face wet with snow. Half-frozen, the face of someone who’d wandered a long time before finally arriving. And even so, it was a face Jieum knew.

She knew that face. Knew it very well.

Rio.

CHROMA’s leader. One of the most famous faces in the world. Jieum had seen that face on billboards, on airport pillars, once through a pair of monitor speakers. A man who’d stood at the top for eight years. And now here he was, at the door of a lighthouse at the edge of the world, standing in the falling snow.

Jieum’s heart did not race. A long time ago she had cut, herself, the circuit that made her heart race at faces like his. She only calculated the direction of the wind leaking through the gap in the door and wished she could get this man inside or send him back out and stop losing this heat.

“Come in. You’re letting the heat out.”

The man blinked. Clearly not the first line he had expected.

Jieum stepped aside. He carried his suitcase over the threshold. Jieum shut the door and threw the bolt, and the world went quiet again. More precisely, as quiet as the thickness of stone. The wind still moaned on the far side of the wall.

The man stood in the entryway, wet-faced, and looked at her. His were eyes waiting for something. Jieum thought she knew those eyes. Eyes waiting to be recognized. Those eyes had spent a lifetime in a world where people recognized him.

“Do you have a room? Online it said this was the last one,” the man said. His voice was rough. “Said this was the only place in the village.”

“It’s closed. The guesthouse.”

“...Sorry?”

“We don’t take guests in winter. Just didn’t take it down online.” Jieum looked past his shoulder at the window. The snow had thickened. “But if you leave now you’ll freeze. The one road out is already about to be buried. So — today, you stay.”

The man was still looking at her. His eyes had gone a little strange. The complete absence of any sign that she’d recognized him seemed, to him, like a foreign language.

Jieum swallowed a sigh. Experience had taught her it was easier for both parties to just name it and move on.

“You’re Rio.”

The man’s shoulders stiffened, very slightly. “...You know me?”

“I do.” Jieum hung the headphones back around her neck and turned away. “So what?”

Silence.

She heard that silence with her back. If there was such a thing as the sound of a person freezing behind you, that was it. She kept walking down the corridor, unbothered. The guest room was on the far side from the control room, the small room the assistant keeper used to have. The heat ran on its lowest setting all day. Jieum cranked the valve halfway open. Precious oil.

The man dragged his suitcase after her. He stopped at the door.

“Um,” he said. “My name’s Dohan. Not Rio. Just Dohan.”

Jieum looked at him. For the first time, she looked a little longer.

The world called him Rio. And yet this man, at a stranger’s door, soaked through, had reached first for his real name. As if that name might be the one that still worked here. Jieum guessed roughly what that meant, but she didn’t let the guess linger. Other people’s stories were heavy, and she already had enough weight of her own.

“Kang Ji-eum,” she said. “Jieum. I own the place. One rule.”

“...Okay.”

“Don’t take care of me.”

Dohan’s eyes went strange again. “What?”

“Don’t cook for me. Don’t do my dishes. Don’t build my fires. And don’t ask, either — anything I can help with?” Jieum opened the door and tipped her chin at the room inside. “People who come here always want to do something for you. Thanks, but you don’t have to. I don’t need anything. Got it.”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She turned and left.

Back in the control room, with the door shut, Jieum stood there for a moment. Strange. What she’d just said was what she said to everyone who came to this village. She’d said it to Jón, to the summer tourists, to the musicians who came to record. I don’t need anything. It was true. It was a fact that hadn’t wavered once in six years.

But just now, while she’d said it, that man had looked at her so directly that one sentence had caught half a beat longer than usual.

Jieum decided to erase that half-beat.

She put on the headphones. The fjord breathed again. Wind, the far collision of drifting ice, the faint friction of the old lens turning at the top of the tower. She collected these sounds. Made them into files, named them, filed them away. Every sound in the world. Every sound but her own voice.

Once this winter’s over.

Come spring, Viti would be sold. The contract was already in the drawer. The new owner meant to make it a boutique hotel. The tower would become a lighting fixture, the booth a suite. Jieum hadn’t decided yet where she’d go after that. If there was an edge farther out than the edge of the world, there.

Two hours later, not a sound came from the guest room. No demand for food, no offer to help. Jieum thought, just for a moment, that it was strangely quiet.

And around midnight, the wind cut out.

The eye of the storm. Jieum knew the texture of that stillness. After stillness like this came a bigger wind. By dawn the road would be completely buried, and the next ferry wouldn’t run for three days at the earliest. That man — Rio or Dohan or whatever — was trapped here for three days.

Jieum looked out the window.

And the sky came on.

Over a world with no color, green flowed. It draped down the ridgeline of the fjord like a curtain, folded, bled into violet. The first aurora of the year. Jieum had seen it countless times, and every time she thought nothing at all. That was just solar wind colliding with oxygen in the upper atmosphere. A physical phenomenon. Pretty inventory. Reflexively, she hit record — the aurora had no sound, and still she always recorded the stillness of that moment.

From the direction of the guest room, a door opened.

Jieum didn’t turn around. In the control room glass, the man’s silhouette showed. Standing at the end of the corridor, looking up at the sky beyond the window. A man who for eight years had stood under the brightest lights in the world, now, in a corridor with no lights at all, with no one watching him, looking up at a sky he’d never seen before.

He made some low sound. A gasp, or a breath.

Jieum’s headphones picked it up.

She didn’t stop recording.

Dohan couldn’t sleep.

Not because the bed was strange. Dohan was an expert in strange beds. Over eight years the list of places he’d slept ran through hotels and vans and dressing-room couches and airplane seats, and he could fall asleep anywhere in three minutes. Sleep, for him, was part of the schedule. He slept because he had to.

But here there was no reason he had to. No call time tomorrow. No rehearsal, no interview, no one coming to wake him. And in front of that fact, for the first time since he was eight years old, Dohan did not know how to fall asleep.

Outside, the storm came back. The wind that had cut out around midnight now beat at the stone house harder than before. Dohan listened to it from under the blanket. He felt like he should be afraid and wasn’t. Strangely, that sound wasn’t aimed at him. Nothing in the world was aimed at him tonight. That was so unfamiliar it kept him awake.

His watch glowed on the nightstand. Three-eleven a.m. Dohan looked at it a long time.

The watch had been a gift from Seung-mo hyung on their fifth debut anniversary. A leader is someone who carries time on his back, he’d said. For eight years Dohan had lived those words literally. His days were sliced into minutes, and in every slice someone was waiting for him. A member, a staffer, the company, a camera. Not once had he stopped between the slices to ask what he himself wanted. There was no gap to ask in. Having no gaps was his pride.

It was that watch, too, that had shoved him all the way out here.