Gods Are Like Stars (Born Dying) [2/2]
Title: Gods Are Like Stars (Born Dying)
Pairings: Kaisoo
Rating: R
Genre: ??? Angst? Tragedy? ????
Warnings: Hover and read carefully!!
Length: ~7.4k (total ~14.8k)
Summary: God gives up divinity for a boy who sees ghosts.
Jongin dreams of being the boy on the sidewalk with the bulky headphones and the pencil between his lips; the book he holds, a complete collection of Kafka’s short stories. He reads the story about a man, a hunger artist, who starves himself for exhibition. In the back of his mind, he vaguely recalls hating this story, and wonders why it’s in the dream-but he allows it to continue as it is.
As he reads, he hears Kyungsoo’s voice in his headphones narrating the story, matching his pace word for word. Somewhere along the way, Kyungsoo’s voice begins to fade, so he turns to his iPod and tries to adjust the volume so that he stays. He turns it up to the highest volume, but he can hardly hear Kyungsoo’s voice anymore. Instead, his own voice, the voice in his head, starts fading into his headphones, so he turns the volume all the way down, until it’s muted, but it’s louder than Kyungsoo’s ever started off as. He tears the headphones off and throws them on the floor.
On the street, he passes a cage with straw at the bottom. The hunger artist from the book watches him, and the voice in his head becomes the hunger artist’s, raspy and weak, quivering, cracking as he speaks. When Jongin finally looks up from the book to meet his gaze, the hunger artist stops talking, crawling forward, a skeleton wrapped in a loose sack of skin, and presses his face to the bars. Gripping the cage, he beckons to Jongin with his finger.
“You and I,” he whispers, heaving the words out as though he can’t speak without dry vomiting, “we are the same. We are the same.”
Furrowing his eyebrows, Jongin walks over to the cage and sits down, facing the hunger artist. Without warning, the man grabs his wrist and tugs him closer; he’s too weak to really pull him, but Jongin moves closer, closer, until he can feel the artist’s acrid breath on his cheeks.
“We are the same,” he repeats, over and over, over and over, until Jongin finally pulls away and asks the man if he would like to eat something. “We are the same,” the man says again, “we are the same, we are the same.”
Suddenly, someone taps Jongin on the shoulder. When he turns around, he sees a man with the face of an analog clock, smiling at him with glass teeth. Everything goes black, and the hunger artist starts to raise his voice, a horrid, strangled wheezing of “we are the same, we are the same,” blending in with the sound of the shattering glass heartbeat, until it all stops, and a flat, neon green line runs across the black of his vision.
He hears himself sigh, loudly, deeply, and lies on the bed with his eyes closed until he can no longer see the flatline on his eyelids.
When he opens them, he turns away from the boring white ceiling and looks to Kyungsoo.
Bewildered, Jongin sits up and leans over, squinting; his vision has gotten worse due to the excess buildup of a slimy something or other in his eyes, though, and there’s not much of a point in doing so. Kyungsoo sits on his bed, propped up against his pillow with an upside-down book in his hands. With his index finger, he points at each of the words individually to read them, mouthing them each time he passes one. Utterly confused, he continues to stare at Kyungsoo, wondering if he should ask why he’s reading a book upside down or wait for Kyungsoo to realize his book is upside down, because he at least knows that Kyungsoo can read his diary well enough to know that his name is Jongin, and that Jongin is God, and that God is going to die.
“The book is upside down, you idiot.”
Both parts of the statement, though condescending enough, lilt into more of a question than intended. Frustrated, Kyungsoo sighs and puts the book facedown on his lap, facing Jongin. “I know. I’m doing an experiment.”
Quirking an eyebrow, Jongin shakes his head and hugs his knees against his chest, mumbling to himself. “What the hell kind of experiment requires you to read a book in a way that you can’t read the book?”
Kyungsoo’s gaze darts upward toward Jongin, briefly lingering over the diary on Jongin’s nightstand. Lips curling into a slight frown, he furrows his eyebrows and picks the book up again, returning to his attempt at reading each word with his index finger. “I want to see if I can turn the story backwards.”
Just as he opens his mouth to ask Kyungsoo if he’s insane, Kyungsoo begins reading the story out loud.
A sudden lethargy washes over him: gravity pulls at his body at least a hundred times stronger within the span of a few seconds, and he sinks down against his pillow until the covers settle over his face again. He stares at the light filtering in through the thin fabric and the patches of cotton until the warm air of his exhalations make the space under the covers too stuffy, and then he stares and suffocates, tracing the light patterns around, rearranging the covers when he grows bored of one pattern and tracing the creases with his finger when he moves on to another. He should have thought of this sooner. Maybe the ceiling wouldn’t have dripped so much acid onto his skin out of his own boredom.
In the background, he listens to Kyungsoo read. He reads slowly, for hours and hours, never picking up speed, never slowing down. By lunchtime, his voice grows strained, and he stops only to eat and drink as quickly as he can before returning to his book. Jongin listens to the words grow hoarser and hoarser, strings the nonsensical words into backwards sentences and traces them out on the comforter with his finger, compiling them in his head as a backwards story. Every once in a while, maybe when he changes the pattern of light through the fabric, or when his limbs jerk out of his control, he forgets all the words and starts over.
At some point during the day, he comes out from under the covers, breathes in the cool, stagnant hospital air, and pukes all over the linoleum next to his bed. His entire body tremors, and his fingers are in his mouth again, being chewed so relentlessly that he can taste bits of his flesh on his tongue like the hinged bit of his lip that he bit off in his sleep. When he reaches over to grab painkillers from the nightstand drawer, he pukes again. Kyungsoo is too focused on turning the book backwards to notice.
The stomachache is nothing unbearable. It’s the same as it usually is, a sharp, incessant jabbing where his kidneys are. It’s another one of those things that he’s learned to suppress over the years, a pain he’s endured to transcend the limitations his stupid condition imposes on him. Turning the container over in his hands, he thinks about the hunger artist in the dream, and wonders if they’re really the same.
It’s only after the nurses turn the main lights off that Jongin twists the cap off and pops two of the painkillers into his mouth. He lifts the covers to peek at Kyungsoo, who still has several pages left of the book, and then turns his own light off, pulling the covers taut over his head and breathing deeply until the air below the comforter becomes too thick again.
They’re not the same, he thinks, eyelids fluttering shut as Kyungsoo’s soft chanting of words fades in and out of the background. He took the painkillers. They are no longer the same.
“Divinity my guards which shell cracking,” Kyungsoo enunciates the next morning, flipping through the pages of Jongin’s diary again. “Thin the from dry sucked be to but naught for manifests brilliance my, purgatory this in.”
His voice is still raw from all of yesterday’s reading. As far as Jongin knows, he might never have slept, pushing through those last pages before immediately coming to read his diary. Too tired to properly wake up, he pretends to sleep, listening to Kyungsoo’s voice tracing backwards through his diary.
Several pages in, long past the first entry Jongin made at the hospital, in the midst of some of the fights Jongin has with his previous foster family, Kyungsoo’s voice begins to slow, faltering, until he stops completely. Patiently, Jongin keeps his eyes shut, waiting for him to either put the diary down or to continue again.
A few minutes pass. Jongin hears Kyungsoo whimper quietly before he reads the next word. “Here.”
Another silence, another whimper. “Welcome.”
“Not.” His voice cracks, reduces to something between a sob and a whisper. “Are you.”
There’s a muted thud when Kyungsoo closes the diary and puts it back down on the nightstand. It dawns on Jongin that the story is going around and around in circles with the backwards sentences he puts together in his thoughts: ever hopeless, ever cruel, a tone of worldly indifference to the life he was born dying in, being thrown in a mental facility, being kicked out of a house, being accepted in another, being kicked out again. It’s more of a cycle of a rejection than it is a life; more of a cycle of dying than it is a timeline of mortality. Even backwards, it goes to the same place, over and over and over.
Jongin doesn’t even know what part of the story Kyungsoo has stopped at. He’s heard the words so many times that almost every chapter of his life ends the same way.
“Are you crying,” he chuckles, opening his eyes and pushing back the covers pulled over his face, “are you really crying?”
Squinting through the bright hospital lights, Jongin can make out Kyungsoo shaking his head, furiously wiping at his eyes. It makes him laugh harder.
“You really are stupid aren’t you?” he snickers, struggling to push himself up against the pillows. “What do you intend to do by reading my diary backwards? Are you trying to turn that story backwards, too?”
Kyungsoo nods, staring at his feet.
“That’s my life, Kyungsoo. You’re fucking stupid. You can’t fucking turn someone’s life backwards. The difference between this diary and your dumb as shit experiment yesterday is that this is real life. Yesterday’s story has a set beginning, a middle, and an end. You can go from the end to the middle to the beginning or the middle to the beginning to the end, or whatever the hell you want. But my life isn’t like that. My life is just one long, big, drawn-the-fuck-out process of dying. The entire fucking thing is an end. Read it backwards, read it forwards, but the whole thing is one huge fucking end.”
By the time Kyungsoo really starts crying, his laughter has gone out of control to the point where he can hardly breathe between his words. He can feel the pains in his abdomen coming back, pangs of aching exploding in one spot, and then another, ironically excruciating after the several hours of pain medication, and then he’s laughing even harder.
“You know,” he adds, “if it really worked that way, if I could just read the whole goddamn story backwards and turn my own life back all the fucking way, I would read it and read it and read it until I wasn’t even born in the first place.” Something wet runs down his cheek. He attributes it to the fact that he’s laughing too hard. “You can’t turn someone’s life backwards, retard. Not even I can do that, and I’m God. I’m the most powerful fucking motherfucker on this goddamn planet. You’re really stupid. God, you’re so stupid.”
Suddenly, Kyungsoo throws Jongin’s pen at him, glaring at him so angrily Jongin wonders if he’s been possessed by Ghostie or something of the sort. “WELL YOU’RE EVEN STUPIDER!” he shouts vehemently, smacking his palms on Jongin’s mattress, careful to avoid hitting Jongin, “If you weren’t born then you wouldn’t even have been able to read your diary backwards in the first place and then you’d be born again. Everyone was supposed to be born! That’s why you were born. That’s why I was born. We’re all supposed to be born, otherwise we wouldn’t have been.”
When he finishes, Jongin’s laughter fades away into his coughing, though the amused grimace never disappears from his face. He doesn’t really know what to say to that, even though he knows not everyone should have been born. Now that he thinks about it, he doesn’t really know why he himself shouldn’t have been born. Maybe it’s because he ruined his parents’ lives, maybe it’s because he ruined the life of everyone who came in contact with him, maybe because his entire life feels like a punishment for being born in the first place, even though the punishment is technically self-imposed, because he didn’t have to overcome that stupid enzyme deficiency to get himself a functioning brain in the first place. He could have just lived his whole life as a brain-dead, kidney-dead, conscious-but-unresponsive vegetable if he wanted to. But why should he have been born, then, if he’s been three-quarters dead since the moment his mother’s umbilical cord was cut, and his only choices are to live like he’s three-quarters dead or pretend to be alive?
“Well you know what?” Jongin uselessly reaches out with a flimsy hand to push Kyungsoo’s angry smacking arms away from his mattress, laughing again. “You’re still fucking stupid. It doesn’t even matter if any of us were supposed to be born or not, because guess the fuck what? Neither of us can turn the story backwards, so it’s just going to go forwards, and no matter what, I’m going to die. I might even die right the fuck now. It doesn’t matter, because every story has an ending. What kind of story doesn’t? Some stories don’t even fucking have a beginning. They start right in the fucking middle. Mine happens to start at the end. So beginnings don’t even matter. Endings do, and every story has an ending.”
“No,” Kyungsoo says, so quietly that Jongin barely catches the movement of his lips in time to decipher what he’s saying. “No.”
After returning to his own bed, Kyungsoo burrows deep under the covers and goes to sleep. Jongin keeps laughing to himself until he chokes on the bitter, burning acid that’s managed to fill up his mouth again, and throws up right onto his own bed. While the nurses clean everything, he sits on the floor by Kyungsoo, leaning against the bedframe and looking over at the curled up lump under the covers, counting how many times he breathes per minute.
Jongin ignores the nurses when they finish, climbing shakily into his bed, wriggling under the covers because he can’t lift them, and leans over to grab his diary. Sighing, he turns it over in his hands, then turns it over again, and again, and again. He flips through the pages, contemplating whether he should rip them all out because there’s not really a point-it’s not really a story if it’s just one giant ending, and he isn’t sure anyone would read about a dying God, anyway. He turns it upside down, scoffing at himself, then flips it back and opens it to the very last page. He rolls onto his side and presses his cheek into the pillow, placing the open diary next to his head, and then stares at it, waiting, until he falls asleep.
Jongin wakes up to himself vomiting on the floor, sprawled sideways over his bed and dry heaving his empty stomach straight out of his mouth. The acid burns the scars on his lips; he can feel it clawing at his esophagus, seeping like fire into his trachea, making him choke out more and more until his head throbs with such intensity that his heart and brain might have switched places. When the attack is over, he hangs limply over the bed, eyes closed, head and feet and arms dangling over the edges, gasping for air. Everything is beating beneath his flesh. His marrow expands and contracts inside his bones, his bones expand and and contract inside his skin, his skin sits like swelling bags of water hung out to dry on his skeleton. As he starts to catch his breath, he opens his eyes, staring down the foreign looking splotches all over the floor, half-amused by the thought of searching for an organ that might have fallen out in the process.
Without knowing, he falls back asleep. The bright jaundice and cold linoleum tile merge seamlessly with his consciousness into a frayed state of dreaming. He’s too tired to think. Bits and pieces of thoughts float in and out of his mind-he wonders why he’s still staring at the sickly yellow puddles on the floor, reminds himself he’s searching for pieces of his stomach, asks himself why, forgets what the question is before he can answer it. Then the puddles begin to move on their own, joining together into pointless shapes, combining into one big yellow pond on the floor, morphing until it develops an atrocious yellow smiley face. It bares its teeth at Jongin, glass shards smiling ferally into his face, the scent of existential decomposition hovering before him as it exhales.
“You and I, we are the same.”
Jerking back from the floor, Jongin attempts to shift back onto the bed entirely, choking and tearing up from the lingering taste of vomit on his tongue and behind his teeth. Gagging on the scent wafting up from the splatters of yellow on the tiles, he nearly throws up again, swallowing everything back just in time as he collapses with his face in his pillow. It would probably be a more enjoyable death if he smothered himself this way, something in the back of his mind tells him. If he wanted to, he could just suffocate like this, and save himself from nightmarish hunger artists and nothings burning in his mouth.
Jongin reaches out for the bottle of painkillers, attempting to regulate his breathing again, and takes three of the pills. He’s gone his entire life refusing to take them, but there’s not even a point. He does it for himself, for the control, but it doesn’t matter because whether or not he’s used to it, it still hurts. Whether or not he even feels the pain anymore, it’s still there, and suddenly he can’t do anything but want all of it to be gone.
The digital clock next to the pills reads 4:30 PM.
Even though he’s just woken up, he wriggles around until he’s flat on his back and staring at the ceiling again. Along with the constant fatigue comes the realization that it’s only a matter of weeks. His skin is swelling in patches over his body, he won’t stop throwing up, there’s some sticky fluid in his eyes that makes everything blurry, and it occurs to him that he hasn’t gone pee for three days. The hallucinations and pain were never really just from the boredom. It’s only a matter of weeks. It’s only a matter of weeks. A matter of weeks. Weeks.
“You’re dying,” he tells himself, unsure of whether it’s the aftertaste of the vomit or the words that sticks more. “You’re dying, Jongin. You’re dying. I’m dying. I’ve always been dying.”
He closes his eyes and lets the words settle like the white paint acid on his skin. Breathes in. Breathes out. It’s been a long time coming.
Sighing again, he turns his head to look at Kyungsoo, who, much to his surprise, is still asleep in the exact same place and position that he went to sleep in yesterday.
“Kyungsoo?”
In an attempt to go back to sleep, he closes his eyes-it’s cold. He opens them again.
“Kyungsoo, wake up.” He waits for several seconds, and then, “Ghostie, tell Kyungsoo to wake up.”
He wonders, then, if Ghostie actually exists. If people become ghosts when they die. He’s going to die. Maybe he’ll become a ghost, too-or maybe not, because God probably won’t become a ghost. He doesn’t even want to be God anymore, maybe. Being God is tiring. God is no better than anyone else-in fact, he’s probably worse off, because his entire life is spent trying to become like everyone else. He’s only God because he’s accomplished the impossible, but in the end, he’s going to die, too. He can accomplish all the impossible he wants: learn how to speak, how to stand up properly, how to walk, how to read. Maybe someday he’ll even stop his involuntary muscle spasms, compulsively biting his lips and fingers, get so good at all of it that he becomes a fucking professional dancer. He can fight the fact that he’s missing part of his brain, that his kidneys don’t even fucking work, that he has impaired development in practically every fucking part of his body, but in the end, God is just like everyone else, and he lives ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million fucking times the struggle, just to die, just like everyone else.
Still looking at Kyungsoo, he presses the button to call the nurse and tells her-without even looking her way-that he wants more of those goddamn painkillers and that he’s leaving in around a week, good fucking riddance. He sucks in a deep breath and shakily pushes himself up from the bed and leans against the mattress, slowly lowering his feet until they touch the ground, carefully placing his weight before walking towards Kyungsoo with shaking steps. His head still throbs from earlier, and he tells himself it’s hard to walk mostly because he’s still dizzy, and his stomach is probably missing, even though he never ended up finding it in any of the gross smelling puddles next to his bed.
“Hey, Kyungsoo.” He places his hand on the lump under the covers and pushes once. “Kyungsoo.” Twice. “Hey, Kyungsoo. Wake up.”
Groggily, Kyungsoo begins to shift around under his covers, straightening out until his head pops out from the edge of the covers by the footboard. He blinks at Jongin several times, rubs his eyes, and squints before hesitantly sitting up and breaking out into a smile. “Good morning, Jong-nini!”
“So, who is Ghostie?” Too tired to keep standing, he grabs a fistful of the bedsheet and pulls himself onto Kyungsoo’s bed to sit. “Is he like, a dead person? An actual person who died?”
Kyungsoo’s smile grows so wide that his eyes crinkle into crescents to make space for it to take up even more than half his face. “Yeah!” he exclaims, bouncing with excitement, “No one’s ever asked me about Ghostie before. Did you know that? You probably didn’t. Ghostie’s a dead person. There’s actually a lot of ghosties who aren’t Ghostie, because there’s a lot of dead people. But Ghostie’s the only one who ever talks to me. He’s my great grandfather, you see, or that’s what he says. I believe him. He’s a really nice guy, did you know? You probably didn’t. He wouldn’t lie. Isn’t that silly? My great grandfather is technically my only friend-”
“Fucking asshole,” Jongin interjects, annoyed at the fact that he apparently no longer has control over what he says, either.
“-one of my only friends, he taught me how to play the piano when I was little. You’d think Mommy and Daddy would believe me that ghosts exist when I started playing the piano like my great grandpa did before they even sent me off to lessons, but Mommy and Daddy were kind of stupid in the head. I’m sorry. That’s rude. But Ghostie, you have to agree with me on this one…”
Too tired to shut him up despite not caring at all about what he’s saying anymore, Jongin lets Kyungsoo keep blathering, warily watching how Kyungsoo’s eyes light up sometimes, and how he smiles even bigger at parts of the story than others, and how his eyes never get any dimmer, just keep lighting brighter and brighter and brighter. Miraculously, he keeps talking until he talks himself to sleep. The enthusiasm behind his words tapers off, and he gradually slouches, curling up in a ball again on his bed, muttering the last few bits and an awkwardly appended the end to his story before dozing off.
He sits and watches Kyungsoo sleep for a few minutes, envying the perpetual state of peace smoothed into his features. Maybe Kyungsoo is stupid, and maybe he’s actually insane by the way he babbles and babbles endlessly until he manages to fall asleep by expenditure of his own voice, but he’s happy. Jongin wonders if this was the price he paid to become God. He, with his damaged basal ganglia, with his HPRT deficiency, with the uric acid build-up in his veins, might have paid the price of happiness in order for the power to fire neurons over a path that was never there. He might have his control and a well-deserved superiority complex, but a brain-dead, kidney-dead, conscious-but-unresponsive vegetable is always just that-only now, because he chose to fight what he is, he became aware of it.
A new wave of nausea threatens to push Jongin to another round of vomiting. He exhales until there’s no more air left in his lungs and pushes himself from Kyungsoo’s bed, staggering over to his own. Pain shoots through his stomach. As he takes his diary from the nightstand, he takes another painkiller, then tucks himself under the covers and opens his diary, biting on his fingertips as he flips to the first page and begins reading.
When he reaches the last word written, he stares at the final period and realizes he doesn’t know what else to do. He watches the words blur in and out of focus for a while, and then blinks away the blurring to flip to the end of the diary, past all the other unfilled lines and straight to the final page next to the back cover, and squints at it.
Maybe, if he stares long enough, the end of his story will just show up. He’ll get to learn if he turns into a ghost or not, if he’s really God. He’ll know if being God was worth it. If he dies for good, if he dies with the stupid ache in his stomach or if he doesn’t, if Kyungsoo is there when he dies, if Kyungsoo isn’t there, if the nurses take care of him nicely. If it’s warm, or if he’s lonely. If he dies with Kyungsoo’s arms around his waist, or with the hunger artist’s incessant rasping devouring him with the mattress. He doesn’t know what will happen to him.
“What are you doing?” Kyungsoo asks, startling Jongin from his thoughts an hour and a half later. “What about all the other pages? That’s a waste of paper.”
“I’m not writing anything, you idiot.” He’s staring at the page with such frustration that it might spontaneously combust at any moment. That, or his brain will. “I’m waiting for an ending to show up.”
Kyungsoo bursts out in a fit of giggles, laughing and laughing, and Jongin can’t do anything but stare at him. He keeps on laughing until Jongin is clenching the notebook so tightly that his fists are shaking, knuckles paling. There’s absolutely nothing funny about this at all-he’s going to die, he’s waiting to see how he’s going to die, and Kyungsoo won’t stop laughing. He’s just about to give up on the whole thing and throw his diary across the room in hopes to break Kyungsoo’s nose, until the other looks up and says, “Oh. You’re not joking? Ghostie, wasn’t it a joke?”
“No, you fucking idiot. I’m not joking. What’s there to fucking joke about?”
Giggling again, Kyungsoo points at his pen. “Aren’t you God, Jong-nini?”
Hesitantly, he nods. “Yes. I’m God.”
“Then, don’t you write the ending?”
He stares at Kyungsoo for what feels like even longer than he’d spent staring at the blank page. He watches Kyungsoo’s features smudge in his vision, forming one big fog of hair and eyes and nose and lips. When he blinks away the haziness, Kyungsoo still watches him expectantly, grinning from ear to ear.
“Yeah,” he muses, chewing into his fingers, rusty taste of blood rolling along the edges of his teeth and dripping onto his tongue. “I guess.”
February March , 2010
In His final act as God, He writes himself an ending. This ending is to be followed at all costs, and without doubt. He is God, after all, and He declares Himself to remain as such until the parting words of his story. When His long process of living out the life of a death concludes, He shall bequeath His title as God to another who might surpass humanity even further than He has. Thus commences the end.
It takes much less time than Jongin thinks to write out his own death-then again, he’s been taking notes on the process of dying since he first learned to write. Regardless, the action drains him, and within a few hours of waking up he can already feel his eyelids threatening to seal shut.
“Kyungsoo,” Jongin calls, stifling a yawn, “Come here.”
He pats the area on the mattress beside him, already too tired to keep his eyes open. Half of his mattress sinks, and he feels a familiar warmth around his waist, against his back, and imagines that he’ll die something like this: warm, with Kyungsoo’s arms wrapped around him; in heaven, with the angels.
“You know what’s really funny?” Jongin mumbles when he wakes up, snuggling into Kyungsoo’s chest after he watches one of the nurses check how many painkillers he has left, prepared to embark on another one of the philosophical spiels he’s been subjecting Kyungsoo to since two days prior. “I think it’s funny how nice the nurses are all of a sudden.”
“Aren’t they supposed to be?”
“Yes, you idiot, but they used to all be a bunch of mean old hags, just because I acted like a mean old hag. I still act like a mean old hag-I haven’t changed in the slightest. But you know what’s different? You know why they’re treating me different?”
“Ghostie says-”
“Ghostie needs to shut up. I want to talk. I’ll find someone else to talk to if you don’t shut up while I’m talking.”
Kyungsoo laughs. Jongin closes his eyes, listening to the way the sound reverberates in his chest. “Ghostie says you don’t mean that.”
“Ghostie’s an asshole. Don’t tell me I didn’t mean it, I did. Anyway, you know why they’re treating me different? It’s because I’m dying. Isn’t that funny? They’re all treating me nice because I’m dying. And you know what happens when I’m dying? I’m the same as all of them.”
“They’re not dying.”
“Everyone’s dying, dumbass. But that’s not my point. My point is, it’s fucking hilarious how nice you can treat even the meanest old hags when they’re dying. Because when they’re dying, they’re no different than you are. You’re going to end up just like them. Dying, dying, dead.”
“Ghostie says-” Jongin’s knee involuntarily jerks up towards his own chest, kneeing Kyungsoo’s stomach in the process. “-Oof.”
“‘Oof’ is fucking right Ghostie, if you don’t shut your dumb fucking mouth.”
“Ghostie says you didn’t mean that.” He grins again, giggling.
“Yeah, well Ghostie still doesn’t know a damn thing.”
Jongin deteriorates faster than he ever imagined possible, though it doesn’t feel much like dying. The painkillers suffice to abate the pain in his stomach, in his fingers, and on his lips, and the fatigue grows to the point that he sometimes falls asleep in the process of reaching for his diary. He can’t really tell how the days pass; often, he sleeps straight from one afternoon to another, or falls asleep at lunchtime and wakes in the middle of the night. Everything becomes one huge montage of dying-but this is how his life has been all along.
Kyungsoo stays by his side, ceaselessly, and Jongin has long since lost any shred of will to make him go away. Most of the time, he sleeps, or pretends to sleep, while Kyungsoo reads his diary or converses with Ghostie. All he really cares about now is that he’s not alone, or perhaps, that he’s alone with Kyungsoo.
In the middle of the night, Jongin wakes up to a throbbing pain in his ankle, only to realize that he’s just kicked Kyungsoo straight off the bed. When Kyungsoo scrambles back under the covers once more and turns to his side to sleep, Jongin smiles and shifts to wrap his arms around Kyungsoo’s waist instead.
“Why is it, do you think, that we all don’t want to die alone?” he whispers, loosening his grip out of the fear that he might accidentally knee Kyungsoo again. “Isn’t that funny to you? What if that’s the only reason I like you, is that I don’t want to die alone?”
“That’s okay,” he replies, shifting in Jongin’s grip to beam at him. “That’s really okay.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s warm, maybe. Warm means less scary.”
“I think you’re wrong. I think it’s because if we die alone, no one knows we’re dead. And if no one knows we’re dead, then it doesn’t matter when we died, and if it doesn’t matter when we died, then it doesn’t really matter how long we lived. Then it just matters that we lived, and everyone is so caught up with living for as long as they can that we need someone else to keep the record straight. And for me, I think it matters because I want to know how fucking long I’ve been dying for.”
“Why me?”
“Because no one else, dumbass. If it were some other stupid kid who just happened to talk to me, I’d probably be just as fine dying next to him, as long as he knows when I died.”
Taken aback, Kyungsoo stays quiet for a moment, and then smiles again. “Ghostie says you didn’t mean that.”
“Ghostie never knows a damn thing.”
“You don’t mean that either.”
“Fine. But I’m still not telling you why.”
“Why?”
“I don’t fucking know, ask Ghostie.”
The next time Jongin wakes up, it’s because he’s accidentally whacked Kyungsoo in the balls, sending him cowering over in a corner of his own bed and leaving the space next to Jongin empty. The minute Jongin asks him to come back, though, he does.
For the rest of the week, things pass by more or less the same way-but it’s not monotonous, like it was just the month prior. Kyungsoo keeps Jongin company day in and day out, even though Jongin whacks him more and more often as time goes by, even though, eventually, he can’t even hold a proper conversation without falling asleep in the middle. When he has nightmares about the clocks, about the hunger artist, about being devoured alive by acid pooling on his skin and feeding him to the mattress, Kyungsoo shakes him awake and hugs him close. Sometimes he doesn’t wake up, and he mistakes Kyungsoo for the gangly limbs of the hunger artist trying to squeeze him through the bars of his cage, or for the pointed glass shards of the smiling clocks preparing to send his ECG into flatline, and he thrashes and screams until the warmth seeps into his bones, until he hears Kyungsoo’s voice and forces himself to open his eyes and breathe.
On the final day, Jongin dreams of tumbling down a green grass hill, perhaps in another world, where there are no scars on his lips and fingers. He’s all by himself on an endless expanse of sloping land, accompanied by nothing but a faint serotinal breeze ruffling his hair. At the bottom of the hill, he sees a small figure, who he recognizes as Kyungsoo, waving at him; he looks back at the top, and he sees the hunger artist lying flat against the ground, blowing bubbles into the sky. The sun is a clock with no moving arms, 12 tick marks placed around a glowing white circle, and there are no shadows on the ground.
When he reaches the bottom, he collides with Kyungsoo and stops his rolling. They lie together against the blades of grass tickling their skin, until he rolls over to face Kyungsoo and hold his hand. Just when they lock eyes, the ground between them splits apart, and they both scramble to get to the other side but instead meet in the middle and fall. In the back of Jongin’s mind, he wants to laugh at how this dream has suddenly turned out, and as they cling to each other in hopes of staying together as they plummet into the abyss, the both of them start laughing. Kyungsoo’s grip around him grows tighter and tighter, but even when it’s so tight he can’t breathe, he keeps laughing, until Kyungsoo’s laughter turns into a faded whimpering and the Earth swallows them into blackness.
“Kyungsoo?” Jongin rubs his eyes, groggily attempting to wriggle around and face Kyungsoo despite the fact that Kyungsoo’s arms are squeezing him so tightly he can barely breathe properly. “Kyungsoo, what the fuck.”
“Ghostie says that,” he pauses, trying to let go of Jongin but only tightening his grip. “That. I should. Ghostie says that today-”
“Hm.”
“You’re not supposed to say that.”
“Oh really? What am I supposed to say then, idiot? What if he does know a damn thing? What if he knows just about everything?”
“What if Ghostie is wrong today?”
“Well then it’ll happen tomorrow, Kyungsoo, or the day after, or the day after. I’m tired. I’m so tired.”
Kyungsoo stays quiet, pulling the covers higher up over Jongin, and then over himself.
“What are you doing.”
“Warm means less scary,” he mumbles, resting his forehead against the nape of Jongin’s neck. “I’m scared.”
“Why are you scared? I’m the one dying, idiot.”
“I don’t want you to die.”
“Well that’s a lame reason to be scared. Everyone is going to die, idiot. But you know what I’m afraid of? Not of dying, but of this whole thing being pointless. Do you think it’s pointless, Kyungsoo? Being God? Pretending to be alive when I was born in the process of dying anyway?”
Kyungsoo doesn’t answer, instead hugging Jongin even tighter.
After a few minutes of silence, Jongin starts to speak again, just above a whisper because he’s too tired to manage anything else. “Write this down with the date, okay? And Ghostie, or whatever your name is, I’m holding you responsible to giving Kyungsoo my time of death, because I want that written down, too.”
Reluctant to let Jongin go, Kyungsoo links arms with him before reaching over to grab the diary and the pen from the nightstand, then nods and props himself up, pressing the diary into the pillow to write.
“In my lifetime, I have accomplished a lot of the impossible. The doctors all told everyone I’d never be able to stand properly, let alone walk, or talk, or read, or write. But I learned how to do all of those things. And in the end, all it did was make me suffer more because I knew I would never be able to do all those things like everyone else could. It was pointless. But you know what I’ve just realized? It doesn’t really matter if it’s pointless. We all have to live anyway. Regardless of whether or not life is pointless, we all have one, so it’s not the point that matters. What matters is if that pointlessness was worth it, and because of you, Kyungsoo-jeez, I sound fucking disgusting, don’t write that part down, or this part, actually, yeah, write it down-because of you, I think it was. I’m glad that I put myself through hell to learn how to do all of it, because I met you.
“When this is all over, when I go to sleep today, or if we’re lucky-or is it unlucky-tomorrow, I’ll be dead. But I wrote an ending for myself and, sidenote, Kyungsoo, you’re not allowed to read it until I’m really dead. You see, if everything goes as planned, then this isn’t so much one long, dragged-out ending or whatever I called it as it is a long, dragged-out ending of a prologue. The beginning starts when this is over. I really get to start living when I’m dead. And I’m glad I did all of this, because when I’m dead, I’ll be able to spend all my time with you. So the answer to my question, Kyungsoo, is that it’s not pointless. You’re the answer. And you know, maybe if we got to know each other better, I’d be able to say this without sounding dumb, but I think I would… like to learn to love you. You’re an idiot. But you made all of this worth it. So thank you.”
Nodding to himself, Jongin yawns and curls up against Kyungsoo, pulling the covers up over both of their heads and wriggling up far enough so that he can rest his chin on the crown of Kyungsoo’s head and closes his eyes.
“Don’t forget, you’re not allowed to read the ending until Ghostie says I’m dead, promise?”
“Jong-nini,” Kyungsoo whimpers, pulling out from under Jongin’s chin and scooting up to look at the other’s face, “Jong-nini, don’t close your eyes.”
“Why not? I’m tired.”
“What about goodbye?”
“I’m putting my bets on not needing it. Goodnight, Kyungsoo.”
“Jong-nini?”
“Jong-nini, you’re not asleep, are you?”
“Jong-nini? Wake up.”
“Jongin?”
“I’m really scared, Jong-nini, I’m scared.”
“Please, Jong-nini, wake up.”
At three in the morning, Ghostie’s raspy, gentle voice prods Kyungsoo awake, warm hands cupping his cheeks to wipe away the tears that still refuse to stop flowing down his cheeks.
“It’s time to read the ending he wrote for you,” he says, pulling his hands away from Kyungsoo’s cheeks to shake him awake, “It’s your turn to wake up, now.”
Kyungsoo doesn’t really know what to do upon waking up except to start crying again, trying to shake Jongin awake even though he’s gone. Ghostie sits him up gently and guides his hand toward the diary, flipping all the way to the last page, where the ending of the story is.
February March , 2010
In His final act as God, He writes himself an ending. This ending is to be followed at all costs, and without doubt. He is God, after all, and He declares Himself to remain as such until the parting words of his story. When His long process of living out the life of a death concludes, He shall bequeath His title as God to another who might surpass humanity even further than He has. Thus commences the end.
At the end, he shall not die as God, but as Jongin, the sixteen-year-old boy who accomplished what they told him was impossible. And then, because his whole life consisted of his ending, he shall be granted a beginning.
In this beginning, he will be granted life instead of death in reincarnation as a ghost. He will again meet Kyungsoo, perhaps immediately after his passing, and he will live out the rest of his days with and by Kyungsoo. And when he meets Kyungsoo, it will not be without recognition, or without aim. When he meets Kyungsoo, it will be with remembrance of his kindness, of his acceptance, and of his warmth, as well as the remembrance of the final promises he may have made and the hopes left unfulfilled. And finally, it will begin where it left off yet on an entirely new page, perhaps with a smile, perhaps with a brushing of the hands, or perhaps with a less formal…
“Morning, you idiot. I told you I wouldn’t have to say goodbye.”
Pairings: Kaisoo
Rating: R
Genre: ??? Angst? Tragedy? ????
Warnings: Hover and read carefully!!
Length: ~7.4k (total ~14.8k)
Summary: God gives up divinity for a boy who sees ghosts.
Jongin dreams of being the boy on the sidewalk with the bulky headphones and the pencil between his lips; the book he holds, a complete collection of Kafka’s short stories. He reads the story about a man, a hunger artist, who starves himself for exhibition. In the back of his mind, he vaguely recalls hating this story, and wonders why it’s in the dream-but he allows it to continue as it is.
As he reads, he hears Kyungsoo’s voice in his headphones narrating the story, matching his pace word for word. Somewhere along the way, Kyungsoo’s voice begins to fade, so he turns to his iPod and tries to adjust the volume so that he stays. He turns it up to the highest volume, but he can hardly hear Kyungsoo’s voice anymore. Instead, his own voice, the voice in his head, starts fading into his headphones, so he turns the volume all the way down, until it’s muted, but it’s louder than Kyungsoo’s ever started off as. He tears the headphones off and throws them on the floor.
On the street, he passes a cage with straw at the bottom. The hunger artist from the book watches him, and the voice in his head becomes the hunger artist’s, raspy and weak, quivering, cracking as he speaks. When Jongin finally looks up from the book to meet his gaze, the hunger artist stops talking, crawling forward, a skeleton wrapped in a loose sack of skin, and presses his face to the bars. Gripping the cage, he beckons to Jongin with his finger.
“You and I,” he whispers, heaving the words out as though he can’t speak without dry vomiting, “we are the same. We are the same.”
Furrowing his eyebrows, Jongin walks over to the cage and sits down, facing the hunger artist. Without warning, the man grabs his wrist and tugs him closer; he’s too weak to really pull him, but Jongin moves closer, closer, until he can feel the artist’s acrid breath on his cheeks.
“We are the same,” he repeats, over and over, over and over, until Jongin finally pulls away and asks the man if he would like to eat something. “We are the same,” the man says again, “we are the same, we are the same.”
Suddenly, someone taps Jongin on the shoulder. When he turns around, he sees a man with the face of an analog clock, smiling at him with glass teeth. Everything goes black, and the hunger artist starts to raise his voice, a horrid, strangled wheezing of “we are the same, we are the same,” blending in with the sound of the shattering glass heartbeat, until it all stops, and a flat, neon green line runs across the black of his vision.
He hears himself sigh, loudly, deeply, and lies on the bed with his eyes closed until he can no longer see the flatline on his eyelids.
When he opens them, he turns away from the boring white ceiling and looks to Kyungsoo.
Bewildered, Jongin sits up and leans over, squinting; his vision has gotten worse due to the excess buildup of a slimy something or other in his eyes, though, and there’s not much of a point in doing so. Kyungsoo sits on his bed, propped up against his pillow with an upside-down book in his hands. With his index finger, he points at each of the words individually to read them, mouthing them each time he passes one. Utterly confused, he continues to stare at Kyungsoo, wondering if he should ask why he’s reading a book upside down or wait for Kyungsoo to realize his book is upside down, because he at least knows that Kyungsoo can read his diary well enough to know that his name is Jongin, and that Jongin is God, and that God is going to die.
“The book is upside down, you idiot.”
Both parts of the statement, though condescending enough, lilt into more of a question than intended. Frustrated, Kyungsoo sighs and puts the book facedown on his lap, facing Jongin. “I know. I’m doing an experiment.”
Quirking an eyebrow, Jongin shakes his head and hugs his knees against his chest, mumbling to himself. “What the hell kind of experiment requires you to read a book in a way that you can’t read the book?”
Kyungsoo’s gaze darts upward toward Jongin, briefly lingering over the diary on Jongin’s nightstand. Lips curling into a slight frown, he furrows his eyebrows and picks the book up again, returning to his attempt at reading each word with his index finger. “I want to see if I can turn the story backwards.”
Just as he opens his mouth to ask Kyungsoo if he’s insane, Kyungsoo begins reading the story out loud.
A sudden lethargy washes over him: gravity pulls at his body at least a hundred times stronger within the span of a few seconds, and he sinks down against his pillow until the covers settle over his face again. He stares at the light filtering in through the thin fabric and the patches of cotton until the warm air of his exhalations make the space under the covers too stuffy, and then he stares and suffocates, tracing the light patterns around, rearranging the covers when he grows bored of one pattern and tracing the creases with his finger when he moves on to another. He should have thought of this sooner. Maybe the ceiling wouldn’t have dripped so much acid onto his skin out of his own boredom.
In the background, he listens to Kyungsoo read. He reads slowly, for hours and hours, never picking up speed, never slowing down. By lunchtime, his voice grows strained, and he stops only to eat and drink as quickly as he can before returning to his book. Jongin listens to the words grow hoarser and hoarser, strings the nonsensical words into backwards sentences and traces them out on the comforter with his finger, compiling them in his head as a backwards story. Every once in a while, maybe when he changes the pattern of light through the fabric, or when his limbs jerk out of his control, he forgets all the words and starts over.
At some point during the day, he comes out from under the covers, breathes in the cool, stagnant hospital air, and pukes all over the linoleum next to his bed. His entire body tremors, and his fingers are in his mouth again, being chewed so relentlessly that he can taste bits of his flesh on his tongue like the hinged bit of his lip that he bit off in his sleep. When he reaches over to grab painkillers from the nightstand drawer, he pukes again. Kyungsoo is too focused on turning the book backwards to notice.
The stomachache is nothing unbearable. It’s the same as it usually is, a sharp, incessant jabbing where his kidneys are. It’s another one of those things that he’s learned to suppress over the years, a pain he’s endured to transcend the limitations his stupid condition imposes on him. Turning the container over in his hands, he thinks about the hunger artist in the dream, and wonders if they’re really the same.
It’s only after the nurses turn the main lights off that Jongin twists the cap off and pops two of the painkillers into his mouth. He lifts the covers to peek at Kyungsoo, who still has several pages left of the book, and then turns his own light off, pulling the covers taut over his head and breathing deeply until the air below the comforter becomes too thick again.
They’re not the same, he thinks, eyelids fluttering shut as Kyungsoo’s soft chanting of words fades in and out of the background. He took the painkillers. They are no longer the same.
“Divinity my guards which shell cracking,” Kyungsoo enunciates the next morning, flipping through the pages of Jongin’s diary again. “Thin the from dry sucked be to but naught for manifests brilliance my, purgatory this in.”
His voice is still raw from all of yesterday’s reading. As far as Jongin knows, he might never have slept, pushing through those last pages before immediately coming to read his diary. Too tired to properly wake up, he pretends to sleep, listening to Kyungsoo’s voice tracing backwards through his diary.
Several pages in, long past the first entry Jongin made at the hospital, in the midst of some of the fights Jongin has with his previous foster family, Kyungsoo’s voice begins to slow, faltering, until he stops completely. Patiently, Jongin keeps his eyes shut, waiting for him to either put the diary down or to continue again.
A few minutes pass. Jongin hears Kyungsoo whimper quietly before he reads the next word. “Here.”
Another silence, another whimper. “Welcome.”
“Not.” His voice cracks, reduces to something between a sob and a whisper. “Are you.”
There’s a muted thud when Kyungsoo closes the diary and puts it back down on the nightstand. It dawns on Jongin that the story is going around and around in circles with the backwards sentences he puts together in his thoughts: ever hopeless, ever cruel, a tone of worldly indifference to the life he was born dying in, being thrown in a mental facility, being kicked out of a house, being accepted in another, being kicked out again. It’s more of a cycle of a rejection than it is a life; more of a cycle of dying than it is a timeline of mortality. Even backwards, it goes to the same place, over and over and over.
Jongin doesn’t even know what part of the story Kyungsoo has stopped at. He’s heard the words so many times that almost every chapter of his life ends the same way.
“Are you crying,” he chuckles, opening his eyes and pushing back the covers pulled over his face, “are you really crying?”
Squinting through the bright hospital lights, Jongin can make out Kyungsoo shaking his head, furiously wiping at his eyes. It makes him laugh harder.
“You really are stupid aren’t you?” he snickers, struggling to push himself up against the pillows. “What do you intend to do by reading my diary backwards? Are you trying to turn that story backwards, too?”
Kyungsoo nods, staring at his feet.
“That’s my life, Kyungsoo. You’re fucking stupid. You can’t fucking turn someone’s life backwards. The difference between this diary and your dumb as shit experiment yesterday is that this is real life. Yesterday’s story has a set beginning, a middle, and an end. You can go from the end to the middle to the beginning or the middle to the beginning to the end, or whatever the hell you want. But my life isn’t like that. My life is just one long, big, drawn-the-fuck-out process of dying. The entire fucking thing is an end. Read it backwards, read it forwards, but the whole thing is one huge fucking end.”
By the time Kyungsoo really starts crying, his laughter has gone out of control to the point where he can hardly breathe between his words. He can feel the pains in his abdomen coming back, pangs of aching exploding in one spot, and then another, ironically excruciating after the several hours of pain medication, and then he’s laughing even harder.
“You know,” he adds, “if it really worked that way, if I could just read the whole goddamn story backwards and turn my own life back all the fucking way, I would read it and read it and read it until I wasn’t even born in the first place.” Something wet runs down his cheek. He attributes it to the fact that he’s laughing too hard. “You can’t turn someone’s life backwards, retard. Not even I can do that, and I’m God. I’m the most powerful fucking motherfucker on this goddamn planet. You’re really stupid. God, you’re so stupid.”
Suddenly, Kyungsoo throws Jongin’s pen at him, glaring at him so angrily Jongin wonders if he’s been possessed by Ghostie or something of the sort. “WELL YOU’RE EVEN STUPIDER!” he shouts vehemently, smacking his palms on Jongin’s mattress, careful to avoid hitting Jongin, “If you weren’t born then you wouldn’t even have been able to read your diary backwards in the first place and then you’d be born again. Everyone was supposed to be born! That’s why you were born. That’s why I was born. We’re all supposed to be born, otherwise we wouldn’t have been.”
When he finishes, Jongin’s laughter fades away into his coughing, though the amused grimace never disappears from his face. He doesn’t really know what to say to that, even though he knows not everyone should have been born. Now that he thinks about it, he doesn’t really know why he himself shouldn’t have been born. Maybe it’s because he ruined his parents’ lives, maybe it’s because he ruined the life of everyone who came in contact with him, maybe because his entire life feels like a punishment for being born in the first place, even though the punishment is technically self-imposed, because he didn’t have to overcome that stupid enzyme deficiency to get himself a functioning brain in the first place. He could have just lived his whole life as a brain-dead, kidney-dead, conscious-but-unresponsive vegetable if he wanted to. But why should he have been born, then, if he’s been three-quarters dead since the moment his mother’s umbilical cord was cut, and his only choices are to live like he’s three-quarters dead or pretend to be alive?
“Well you know what?” Jongin uselessly reaches out with a flimsy hand to push Kyungsoo’s angry smacking arms away from his mattress, laughing again. “You’re still fucking stupid. It doesn’t even matter if any of us were supposed to be born or not, because guess the fuck what? Neither of us can turn the story backwards, so it’s just going to go forwards, and no matter what, I’m going to die. I might even die right the fuck now. It doesn’t matter, because every story has an ending. What kind of story doesn’t? Some stories don’t even fucking have a beginning. They start right in the fucking middle. Mine happens to start at the end. So beginnings don’t even matter. Endings do, and every story has an ending.”
“No,” Kyungsoo says, so quietly that Jongin barely catches the movement of his lips in time to decipher what he’s saying. “No.”
After returning to his own bed, Kyungsoo burrows deep under the covers and goes to sleep. Jongin keeps laughing to himself until he chokes on the bitter, burning acid that’s managed to fill up his mouth again, and throws up right onto his own bed. While the nurses clean everything, he sits on the floor by Kyungsoo, leaning against the bedframe and looking over at the curled up lump under the covers, counting how many times he breathes per minute.
Jongin ignores the nurses when they finish, climbing shakily into his bed, wriggling under the covers because he can’t lift them, and leans over to grab his diary. Sighing, he turns it over in his hands, then turns it over again, and again, and again. He flips through the pages, contemplating whether he should rip them all out because there’s not really a point-it’s not really a story if it’s just one giant ending, and he isn’t sure anyone would read about a dying God, anyway. He turns it upside down, scoffing at himself, then flips it back and opens it to the very last page. He rolls onto his side and presses his cheek into the pillow, placing the open diary next to his head, and then stares at it, waiting, until he falls asleep.
Jongin wakes up to himself vomiting on the floor, sprawled sideways over his bed and dry heaving his empty stomach straight out of his mouth. The acid burns the scars on his lips; he can feel it clawing at his esophagus, seeping like fire into his trachea, making him choke out more and more until his head throbs with such intensity that his heart and brain might have switched places. When the attack is over, he hangs limply over the bed, eyes closed, head and feet and arms dangling over the edges, gasping for air. Everything is beating beneath his flesh. His marrow expands and contracts inside his bones, his bones expand and and contract inside his skin, his skin sits like swelling bags of water hung out to dry on his skeleton. As he starts to catch his breath, he opens his eyes, staring down the foreign looking splotches all over the floor, half-amused by the thought of searching for an organ that might have fallen out in the process.
Without knowing, he falls back asleep. The bright jaundice and cold linoleum tile merge seamlessly with his consciousness into a frayed state of dreaming. He’s too tired to think. Bits and pieces of thoughts float in and out of his mind-he wonders why he’s still staring at the sickly yellow puddles on the floor, reminds himself he’s searching for pieces of his stomach, asks himself why, forgets what the question is before he can answer it. Then the puddles begin to move on their own, joining together into pointless shapes, combining into one big yellow pond on the floor, morphing until it develops an atrocious yellow smiley face. It bares its teeth at Jongin, glass shards smiling ferally into his face, the scent of existential decomposition hovering before him as it exhales.
“You and I, we are the same.”
Jerking back from the floor, Jongin attempts to shift back onto the bed entirely, choking and tearing up from the lingering taste of vomit on his tongue and behind his teeth. Gagging on the scent wafting up from the splatters of yellow on the tiles, he nearly throws up again, swallowing everything back just in time as he collapses with his face in his pillow. It would probably be a more enjoyable death if he smothered himself this way, something in the back of his mind tells him. If he wanted to, he could just suffocate like this, and save himself from nightmarish hunger artists and nothings burning in his mouth.
Jongin reaches out for the bottle of painkillers, attempting to regulate his breathing again, and takes three of the pills. He’s gone his entire life refusing to take them, but there’s not even a point. He does it for himself, for the control, but it doesn’t matter because whether or not he’s used to it, it still hurts. Whether or not he even feels the pain anymore, it’s still there, and suddenly he can’t do anything but want all of it to be gone.
The digital clock next to the pills reads 4:30 PM.
Even though he’s just woken up, he wriggles around until he’s flat on his back and staring at the ceiling again. Along with the constant fatigue comes the realization that it’s only a matter of weeks. His skin is swelling in patches over his body, he won’t stop throwing up, there’s some sticky fluid in his eyes that makes everything blurry, and it occurs to him that he hasn’t gone pee for three days. The hallucinations and pain were never really just from the boredom. It’s only a matter of weeks. It’s only a matter of weeks. A matter of weeks. Weeks.
“You’re dying,” he tells himself, unsure of whether it’s the aftertaste of the vomit or the words that sticks more. “You’re dying, Jongin. You’re dying. I’m dying. I’ve always been dying.”
He closes his eyes and lets the words settle like the white paint acid on his skin. Breathes in. Breathes out. It’s been a long time coming.
Sighing again, he turns his head to look at Kyungsoo, who, much to his surprise, is still asleep in the exact same place and position that he went to sleep in yesterday.
“Kyungsoo?”
In an attempt to go back to sleep, he closes his eyes-it’s cold. He opens them again.
“Kyungsoo, wake up.” He waits for several seconds, and then, “Ghostie, tell Kyungsoo to wake up.”
He wonders, then, if Ghostie actually exists. If people become ghosts when they die. He’s going to die. Maybe he’ll become a ghost, too-or maybe not, because God probably won’t become a ghost. He doesn’t even want to be God anymore, maybe. Being God is tiring. God is no better than anyone else-in fact, he’s probably worse off, because his entire life is spent trying to become like everyone else. He’s only God because he’s accomplished the impossible, but in the end, he’s going to die, too. He can accomplish all the impossible he wants: learn how to speak, how to stand up properly, how to walk, how to read. Maybe someday he’ll even stop his involuntary muscle spasms, compulsively biting his lips and fingers, get so good at all of it that he becomes a fucking professional dancer. He can fight the fact that he’s missing part of his brain, that his kidneys don’t even fucking work, that he has impaired development in practically every fucking part of his body, but in the end, God is just like everyone else, and he lives ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million fucking times the struggle, just to die, just like everyone else.
Still looking at Kyungsoo, he presses the button to call the nurse and tells her-without even looking her way-that he wants more of those goddamn painkillers and that he’s leaving in around a week, good fucking riddance. He sucks in a deep breath and shakily pushes himself up from the bed and leans against the mattress, slowly lowering his feet until they touch the ground, carefully placing his weight before walking towards Kyungsoo with shaking steps. His head still throbs from earlier, and he tells himself it’s hard to walk mostly because he’s still dizzy, and his stomach is probably missing, even though he never ended up finding it in any of the gross smelling puddles next to his bed.
“Hey, Kyungsoo.” He places his hand on the lump under the covers and pushes once. “Kyungsoo.” Twice. “Hey, Kyungsoo. Wake up.”
Groggily, Kyungsoo begins to shift around under his covers, straightening out until his head pops out from the edge of the covers by the footboard. He blinks at Jongin several times, rubs his eyes, and squints before hesitantly sitting up and breaking out into a smile. “Good morning, Jong-nini!”
“So, who is Ghostie?” Too tired to keep standing, he grabs a fistful of the bedsheet and pulls himself onto Kyungsoo’s bed to sit. “Is he like, a dead person? An actual person who died?”
Kyungsoo’s smile grows so wide that his eyes crinkle into crescents to make space for it to take up even more than half his face. “Yeah!” he exclaims, bouncing with excitement, “No one’s ever asked me about Ghostie before. Did you know that? You probably didn’t. Ghostie’s a dead person. There’s actually a lot of ghosties who aren’t Ghostie, because there’s a lot of dead people. But Ghostie’s the only one who ever talks to me. He’s my great grandfather, you see, or that’s what he says. I believe him. He’s a really nice guy, did you know? You probably didn’t. He wouldn’t lie. Isn’t that silly? My great grandfather is technically my only friend-”
“Fucking asshole,” Jongin interjects, annoyed at the fact that he apparently no longer has control over what he says, either.
“-one of my only friends, he taught me how to play the piano when I was little. You’d think Mommy and Daddy would believe me that ghosts exist when I started playing the piano like my great grandpa did before they even sent me off to lessons, but Mommy and Daddy were kind of stupid in the head. I’m sorry. That’s rude. But Ghostie, you have to agree with me on this one…”
Too tired to shut him up despite not caring at all about what he’s saying anymore, Jongin lets Kyungsoo keep blathering, warily watching how Kyungsoo’s eyes light up sometimes, and how he smiles even bigger at parts of the story than others, and how his eyes never get any dimmer, just keep lighting brighter and brighter and brighter. Miraculously, he keeps talking until he talks himself to sleep. The enthusiasm behind his words tapers off, and he gradually slouches, curling up in a ball again on his bed, muttering the last few bits and an awkwardly appended the end to his story before dozing off.
He sits and watches Kyungsoo sleep for a few minutes, envying the perpetual state of peace smoothed into his features. Maybe Kyungsoo is stupid, and maybe he’s actually insane by the way he babbles and babbles endlessly until he manages to fall asleep by expenditure of his own voice, but he’s happy. Jongin wonders if this was the price he paid to become God. He, with his damaged basal ganglia, with his HPRT deficiency, with the uric acid build-up in his veins, might have paid the price of happiness in order for the power to fire neurons over a path that was never there. He might have his control and a well-deserved superiority complex, but a brain-dead, kidney-dead, conscious-but-unresponsive vegetable is always just that-only now, because he chose to fight what he is, he became aware of it.
A new wave of nausea threatens to push Jongin to another round of vomiting. He exhales until there’s no more air left in his lungs and pushes himself from Kyungsoo’s bed, staggering over to his own. Pain shoots through his stomach. As he takes his diary from the nightstand, he takes another painkiller, then tucks himself under the covers and opens his diary, biting on his fingertips as he flips to the first page and begins reading.
When he reaches the last word written, he stares at the final period and realizes he doesn’t know what else to do. He watches the words blur in and out of focus for a while, and then blinks away the blurring to flip to the end of the diary, past all the other unfilled lines and straight to the final page next to the back cover, and squints at it.
Maybe, if he stares long enough, the end of his story will just show up. He’ll get to learn if he turns into a ghost or not, if he’s really God. He’ll know if being God was worth it. If he dies for good, if he dies with the stupid ache in his stomach or if he doesn’t, if Kyungsoo is there when he dies, if Kyungsoo isn’t there, if the nurses take care of him nicely. If it’s warm, or if he’s lonely. If he dies with Kyungsoo’s arms around his waist, or with the hunger artist’s incessant rasping devouring him with the mattress. He doesn’t know what will happen to him.
“What are you doing?” Kyungsoo asks, startling Jongin from his thoughts an hour and a half later. “What about all the other pages? That’s a waste of paper.”
“I’m not writing anything, you idiot.” He’s staring at the page with such frustration that it might spontaneously combust at any moment. That, or his brain will. “I’m waiting for an ending to show up.”
Kyungsoo bursts out in a fit of giggles, laughing and laughing, and Jongin can’t do anything but stare at him. He keeps on laughing until Jongin is clenching the notebook so tightly that his fists are shaking, knuckles paling. There’s absolutely nothing funny about this at all-he’s going to die, he’s waiting to see how he’s going to die, and Kyungsoo won’t stop laughing. He’s just about to give up on the whole thing and throw his diary across the room in hopes to break Kyungsoo’s nose, until the other looks up and says, “Oh. You’re not joking? Ghostie, wasn’t it a joke?”
“No, you fucking idiot. I’m not joking. What’s there to fucking joke about?”
Giggling again, Kyungsoo points at his pen. “Aren’t you God, Jong-nini?”
Hesitantly, he nods. “Yes. I’m God.”
“Then, don’t you write the ending?”
He stares at Kyungsoo for what feels like even longer than he’d spent staring at the blank page. He watches Kyungsoo’s features smudge in his vision, forming one big fog of hair and eyes and nose and lips. When he blinks away the haziness, Kyungsoo still watches him expectantly, grinning from ear to ear.
“Yeah,” he muses, chewing into his fingers, rusty taste of blood rolling along the edges of his teeth and dripping onto his tongue. “I guess.”
February March , 2010
In His final act as God, He writes himself an ending. This ending is to be followed at all costs, and without doubt. He is God, after all, and He declares Himself to remain as such until the parting words of his story. When His long process of living out the life of a death concludes, He shall bequeath His title as God to another who might surpass humanity even further than He has. Thus commences the end.
It takes much less time than Jongin thinks to write out his own death-then again, he’s been taking notes on the process of dying since he first learned to write. Regardless, the action drains him, and within a few hours of waking up he can already feel his eyelids threatening to seal shut.
“Kyungsoo,” Jongin calls, stifling a yawn, “Come here.”
He pats the area on the mattress beside him, already too tired to keep his eyes open. Half of his mattress sinks, and he feels a familiar warmth around his waist, against his back, and imagines that he’ll die something like this: warm, with Kyungsoo’s arms wrapped around him; in heaven, with the angels.
“You know what’s really funny?” Jongin mumbles when he wakes up, snuggling into Kyungsoo’s chest after he watches one of the nurses check how many painkillers he has left, prepared to embark on another one of the philosophical spiels he’s been subjecting Kyungsoo to since two days prior. “I think it’s funny how nice the nurses are all of a sudden.”
“Aren’t they supposed to be?”
“Yes, you idiot, but they used to all be a bunch of mean old hags, just because I acted like a mean old hag. I still act like a mean old hag-I haven’t changed in the slightest. But you know what’s different? You know why they’re treating me different?”
“Ghostie says-”
“Ghostie needs to shut up. I want to talk. I’ll find someone else to talk to if you don’t shut up while I’m talking.”
Kyungsoo laughs. Jongin closes his eyes, listening to the way the sound reverberates in his chest. “Ghostie says you don’t mean that.”
“Ghostie’s an asshole. Don’t tell me I didn’t mean it, I did. Anyway, you know why they’re treating me different? It’s because I’m dying. Isn’t that funny? They’re all treating me nice because I’m dying. And you know what happens when I’m dying? I’m the same as all of them.”
“They’re not dying.”
“Everyone’s dying, dumbass. But that’s not my point. My point is, it’s fucking hilarious how nice you can treat even the meanest old hags when they’re dying. Because when they’re dying, they’re no different than you are. You’re going to end up just like them. Dying, dying, dead.”
“Ghostie says-” Jongin’s knee involuntarily jerks up towards his own chest, kneeing Kyungsoo’s stomach in the process. “-Oof.”
“‘Oof’ is fucking right Ghostie, if you don’t shut your dumb fucking mouth.”
“Ghostie says you didn’t mean that.” He grins again, giggling.
“Yeah, well Ghostie still doesn’t know a damn thing.”
Jongin deteriorates faster than he ever imagined possible, though it doesn’t feel much like dying. The painkillers suffice to abate the pain in his stomach, in his fingers, and on his lips, and the fatigue grows to the point that he sometimes falls asleep in the process of reaching for his diary. He can’t really tell how the days pass; often, he sleeps straight from one afternoon to another, or falls asleep at lunchtime and wakes in the middle of the night. Everything becomes one huge montage of dying-but this is how his life has been all along.
Kyungsoo stays by his side, ceaselessly, and Jongin has long since lost any shred of will to make him go away. Most of the time, he sleeps, or pretends to sleep, while Kyungsoo reads his diary or converses with Ghostie. All he really cares about now is that he’s not alone, or perhaps, that he’s alone with Kyungsoo.
In the middle of the night, Jongin wakes up to a throbbing pain in his ankle, only to realize that he’s just kicked Kyungsoo straight off the bed. When Kyungsoo scrambles back under the covers once more and turns to his side to sleep, Jongin smiles and shifts to wrap his arms around Kyungsoo’s waist instead.
“Why is it, do you think, that we all don’t want to die alone?” he whispers, loosening his grip out of the fear that he might accidentally knee Kyungsoo again. “Isn’t that funny to you? What if that’s the only reason I like you, is that I don’t want to die alone?”
“That’s okay,” he replies, shifting in Jongin’s grip to beam at him. “That’s really okay.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s warm, maybe. Warm means less scary.”
“I think you’re wrong. I think it’s because if we die alone, no one knows we’re dead. And if no one knows we’re dead, then it doesn’t matter when we died, and if it doesn’t matter when we died, then it doesn’t really matter how long we lived. Then it just matters that we lived, and everyone is so caught up with living for as long as they can that we need someone else to keep the record straight. And for me, I think it matters because I want to know how fucking long I’ve been dying for.”
“Why me?”
“Because no one else, dumbass. If it were some other stupid kid who just happened to talk to me, I’d probably be just as fine dying next to him, as long as he knows when I died.”
Taken aback, Kyungsoo stays quiet for a moment, and then smiles again. “Ghostie says you didn’t mean that.”
“Ghostie never knows a damn thing.”
“You don’t mean that either.”
“Fine. But I’m still not telling you why.”
“Why?”
“I don’t fucking know, ask Ghostie.”
The next time Jongin wakes up, it’s because he’s accidentally whacked Kyungsoo in the balls, sending him cowering over in a corner of his own bed and leaving the space next to Jongin empty. The minute Jongin asks him to come back, though, he does.
For the rest of the week, things pass by more or less the same way-but it’s not monotonous, like it was just the month prior. Kyungsoo keeps Jongin company day in and day out, even though Jongin whacks him more and more often as time goes by, even though, eventually, he can’t even hold a proper conversation without falling asleep in the middle. When he has nightmares about the clocks, about the hunger artist, about being devoured alive by acid pooling on his skin and feeding him to the mattress, Kyungsoo shakes him awake and hugs him close. Sometimes he doesn’t wake up, and he mistakes Kyungsoo for the gangly limbs of the hunger artist trying to squeeze him through the bars of his cage, or for the pointed glass shards of the smiling clocks preparing to send his ECG into flatline, and he thrashes and screams until the warmth seeps into his bones, until he hears Kyungsoo’s voice and forces himself to open his eyes and breathe.
On the final day, Jongin dreams of tumbling down a green grass hill, perhaps in another world, where there are no scars on his lips and fingers. He’s all by himself on an endless expanse of sloping land, accompanied by nothing but a faint serotinal breeze ruffling his hair. At the bottom of the hill, he sees a small figure, who he recognizes as Kyungsoo, waving at him; he looks back at the top, and he sees the hunger artist lying flat against the ground, blowing bubbles into the sky. The sun is a clock with no moving arms, 12 tick marks placed around a glowing white circle, and there are no shadows on the ground.
When he reaches the bottom, he collides with Kyungsoo and stops his rolling. They lie together against the blades of grass tickling their skin, until he rolls over to face Kyungsoo and hold his hand. Just when they lock eyes, the ground between them splits apart, and they both scramble to get to the other side but instead meet in the middle and fall. In the back of Jongin’s mind, he wants to laugh at how this dream has suddenly turned out, and as they cling to each other in hopes of staying together as they plummet into the abyss, the both of them start laughing. Kyungsoo’s grip around him grows tighter and tighter, but even when it’s so tight he can’t breathe, he keeps laughing, until Kyungsoo’s laughter turns into a faded whimpering and the Earth swallows them into blackness.
“Kyungsoo?” Jongin rubs his eyes, groggily attempting to wriggle around and face Kyungsoo despite the fact that Kyungsoo’s arms are squeezing him so tightly he can barely breathe properly. “Kyungsoo, what the fuck.”
“Ghostie says that,” he pauses, trying to let go of Jongin but only tightening his grip. “That. I should. Ghostie says that today-”
“Hm.”
“You’re not supposed to say that.”
“Oh really? What am I supposed to say then, idiot? What if he does know a damn thing? What if he knows just about everything?”
“What if Ghostie is wrong today?”
“Well then it’ll happen tomorrow, Kyungsoo, or the day after, or the day after. I’m tired. I’m so tired.”
Kyungsoo stays quiet, pulling the covers higher up over Jongin, and then over himself.
“What are you doing.”
“Warm means less scary,” he mumbles, resting his forehead against the nape of Jongin’s neck. “I’m scared.”
“Why are you scared? I’m the one dying, idiot.”
“I don’t want you to die.”
“Well that’s a lame reason to be scared. Everyone is going to die, idiot. But you know what I’m afraid of? Not of dying, but of this whole thing being pointless. Do you think it’s pointless, Kyungsoo? Being God? Pretending to be alive when I was born in the process of dying anyway?”
Kyungsoo doesn’t answer, instead hugging Jongin even tighter.
After a few minutes of silence, Jongin starts to speak again, just above a whisper because he’s too tired to manage anything else. “Write this down with the date, okay? And Ghostie, or whatever your name is, I’m holding you responsible to giving Kyungsoo my time of death, because I want that written down, too.”
Reluctant to let Jongin go, Kyungsoo links arms with him before reaching over to grab the diary and the pen from the nightstand, then nods and props himself up, pressing the diary into the pillow to write.
“In my lifetime, I have accomplished a lot of the impossible. The doctors all told everyone I’d never be able to stand properly, let alone walk, or talk, or read, or write. But I learned how to do all of those things. And in the end, all it did was make me suffer more because I knew I would never be able to do all those things like everyone else could. It was pointless. But you know what I’ve just realized? It doesn’t really matter if it’s pointless. We all have to live anyway. Regardless of whether or not life is pointless, we all have one, so it’s not the point that matters. What matters is if that pointlessness was worth it, and because of you, Kyungsoo-jeez, I sound fucking disgusting, don’t write that part down, or this part, actually, yeah, write it down-because of you, I think it was. I’m glad that I put myself through hell to learn how to do all of it, because I met you.
“When this is all over, when I go to sleep today, or if we’re lucky-or is it unlucky-tomorrow, I’ll be dead. But I wrote an ending for myself and, sidenote, Kyungsoo, you’re not allowed to read it until I’m really dead. You see, if everything goes as planned, then this isn’t so much one long, dragged-out ending or whatever I called it as it is a long, dragged-out ending of a prologue. The beginning starts when this is over. I really get to start living when I’m dead. And I’m glad I did all of this, because when I’m dead, I’ll be able to spend all my time with you. So the answer to my question, Kyungsoo, is that it’s not pointless. You’re the answer. And you know, maybe if we got to know each other better, I’d be able to say this without sounding dumb, but I think I would… like to learn to love you. You’re an idiot. But you made all of this worth it. So thank you.”
Nodding to himself, Jongin yawns and curls up against Kyungsoo, pulling the covers up over both of their heads and wriggling up far enough so that he can rest his chin on the crown of Kyungsoo’s head and closes his eyes.
“Don’t forget, you’re not allowed to read the ending until Ghostie says I’m dead, promise?”
“Jong-nini,” Kyungsoo whimpers, pulling out from under Jongin’s chin and scooting up to look at the other’s face, “Jong-nini, don’t close your eyes.”
“Why not? I’m tired.”
“What about goodbye?”
“I’m putting my bets on not needing it. Goodnight, Kyungsoo.”
“Jong-nini?”
“Jong-nini, you’re not asleep, are you?”
“Jong-nini? Wake up.”
“Jongin?”
“I’m really scared, Jong-nini, I’m scared.”
“Please, Jong-nini, wake up.”
At three in the morning, Ghostie’s raspy, gentle voice prods Kyungsoo awake, warm hands cupping his cheeks to wipe away the tears that still refuse to stop flowing down his cheeks.
“It’s time to read the ending he wrote for you,” he says, pulling his hands away from Kyungsoo’s cheeks to shake him awake, “It’s your turn to wake up, now.”
Kyungsoo doesn’t really know what to do upon waking up except to start crying again, trying to shake Jongin awake even though he’s gone. Ghostie sits him up gently and guides his hand toward the diary, flipping all the way to the last page, where the ending of the story is.
February March , 2010
In His final act as God, He writes himself an ending. This ending is to be followed at all costs, and without doubt. He is God, after all, and He declares Himself to remain as such until the parting words of his story. When His long process of living out the life of a death concludes, He shall bequeath His title as God to another who might surpass humanity even further than He has. Thus commences the end.
At the end, he shall not die as God, but as Jongin, the sixteen-year-old boy who accomplished what they told him was impossible. And then, because his whole life consisted of his ending, he shall be granted a beginning.
In this beginning, he will be granted life instead of death in reincarnation as a ghost. He will again meet Kyungsoo, perhaps immediately after his passing, and he will live out the rest of his days with and by Kyungsoo. And when he meets Kyungsoo, it will not be without recognition, or without aim. When he meets Kyungsoo, it will be with remembrance of his kindness, of his acceptance, and of his warmth, as well as the remembrance of the final promises he may have made and the hopes left unfulfilled. And finally, it will begin where it left off yet on an entirely new page, perhaps with a smile, perhaps with a brushing of the hands, or perhaps with a less formal…
“Morning, you idiot. I told you I wouldn’t have to say goodbye.”