Chương 1: He Was Good at Guitar

Tiny bulbs hung in a row across the cafe window. The sun had not fully set yet, but the lights were already on, their yellow glow spreading softly across the glass. Outside, people on their way home drifted past. Some laughed with paper cups in hand. Others waved and ran for the bus stop. From the speakers inside came a bright pop song that felt like it belonged to the wrong season. A promotional stand for the cafe's new strawberry cake stood in the middle of the store. Today's recommended set.

A small gift for a sweeter day. Kichan had been staring at those words for a while. Calling it a small gift was a stretch when one slice of cake cost more than a bowl of gukbap, and there was no way this was going to be a sweeter day with the look on Sooyeon's face across from him. Sooyeon had both hands wrapped around her coffee cup. The iced Americano inside had gone half-cold without her taking a single sip. The ice had melted into a clear layer at the bottom, and the straw leaned toward her side.

Han Kichan stared at it blankly. He wished the straw would move. If it moved, it would mean Sooyeon was at least drinking her coffee. And if she was drinking her coffee, then maybe this conversation was not over yet.

"Oppa." That one word slipped through the pop song, the cake sign, and the yellow lights, then landed in front of Kichan with quiet precision.

"When you play guitar, you look fine." Sooyeon said it in a small voice. It was quieter than the cafe music, quieter than the couple laughing at the next table. But somehow those words lodged in his ears with perfect clarity.

"When you sing, too." She paused there. The moment he heard that, Kichan thought of the tiny drinking place near campus and its shabby little stage. The microphone kept squealing. One speaker crackled with static. By the second song, the guitar strings had already started biting into his fingers. But that night, people had gone quiet for a moment. When Kichan pushed out the first line in a low voice, a few noisy tables turned to look. Sooyeon had been one of them. She had been smiling then.

"Back then, you seemed like someone who was actually living his own life."

"Yeah." That was all Kichan said.

"But once we actually started dating..." Sooyeon searched for her next words. In that pause, Kichan scrambled for a defense. I have a job. I get paid. I do not drink that much. I do not gamble. I do not cheat. I am good to my parents. And I'm good at guitar. And singing...

"Other than that, I don't think there's much you're actually good at." Every argument in his head vanished. Sooyeon did not avoid his eyes. She looked sorry, but that part at least was not a lie. That made it worse. If she were lying, he could have gotten angry.

"I don't mean you're a bad person."

"I know."

"I just... maybe I'm kind of awful."

"I don't think that's it." The second he said it, he regretted it. Comforting the person who was dumping you was not exactly proper behavior. But his mouth had moved before his brain caught up. Sooyeon smiled a little. That hurt even more.

"That's exactly what you do, oppa."

"What does that even mean?"

"You act like you're fine even when you're having a hard time." Kichan said nothing. It was not that he was pretending to be okay. He just had nothing to say. Sooyeon picked up her bag. The chair legs scraped against the floor. The cafe door opened, and a breath of early summer air slipped inside.

"I'm sorry." After saying that, Sooyeon left. Kichan stayed where he was for a while. In front of the cold Americano. He had already paid for both coffees. For some reason, that was the clearest fact left from the entire conversation. When he got home, the smell of doenjang stew was waiting in the entryway. The moment he smelled it, Kichan felt even more ruined. His life could fall apart outside, and at home there would still be the smell of dinner. He knew he ought to be grateful for that.

Somehow it only made him feel smaller.

"You're home?" His mother leaned out from the kitchen.

"Yeah."

"Did you eat?"

"Sort of."

"Sort of isn't eating. Wash your hands and sit down." Instead of answering, Kichan slipped off his shoes. His father was in the living room watching the news. Names of politicians and stock indexes crawled across the bottom of the screen. His father glanced at him and said nothing. That was easier. The meal his mother laid out was a little more generous than usual. Doenjang stew, rolled omelet, stir-fried anchovies, kimchi, seasoned spinach. Kichan picked up his chopsticks.

"Weren't you meeting Sooyeon today?" His mother asked it casually. His chopsticks froze halfway to the omelet.

"Yeah."

"Did it go well?"

"It was... fine." She did not ask anything else. She just nudged the bowl of stew a little closer to him.

"The soup's getting cold." Without a word, his father also moved the anchovy side dish in front of him. That tiny plate almost broke him. Kichan lowered his head and ate. The food was good. That only made him more irritated. He'd just been dumped, and he still had an appetite. Worse, the food tasted good. What the hell was wrong with him? Grumbling to himself, Kichan took another spoonful of stew. Back in his room, he opened his guitar case. The guitar leaned beside the bed.

It was the reason he and Sooyeon had first gotten close. At a club drinking party, someone had told him to sing something, and he'd picked up the guitar without thinking much about it. Sooyeon had smiled then. That one smile had turned him into an embarrassingly diligent person for several months. He texted her. Asked her out. Paid attention to what he wore. Even exercised for two whole days. Two days was a decent effort by any reasonable standard. Kichan plucked a string. The low E rang out. It sounded fine.

His fingers moved on their own. The chords changed. A melody settled over them. Even his voice came out steadier than he'd expected. When you play guitar, you look fine. Kichan stopped singing.

"Damn it." All at once, being good at guitar pissed him off. It felt even more unfair that he was not suddenly bad at it. He set the guitar down and turned on his computer. When the monitor came to life, all the browser tabs he'd left open blinked back into existence. Job sites. A used instrument marketplace. Workout routine videos. And at the far end, one strange forum with an aggressively unimpressive title. [Collection of People Who've Seen Weird Books] Kichan had been reading that board for the past few days.

At first it had only been because of a video the algorithm had pushed at him. Books that supposedly drove people strange if they read them. Lost translations. PDFs floating around under the names of publishers that did not exist. Posts from people claiming they'd had bizarre dreams after reading one. Out of all of them, the name Voynich manuscript kept catching his eye. A book full of diagrams that might have been plants or might have been nonsense, one that nobody had ever properly deciphered.

Most people would have laughed and moved on. Kichan had laughed too, at first. But even after laughing, he had not closed the tab. Because a thought kept coming back to him. If someone really read something like that, would it actually change them? He did not mean anything grand like uncovering the secrets of the universe. That sounded exhausting. Besides, even if he learned the secrets of the universe, it probably would not lower his taxes. Still. Wouldn't you at least get something?

A talent good enough to land a better job. A skill that could make real money. A way to feel less shabby in front of other people. Or at the very least, something enough that your girlfriend would not tell you you had nothing going for you besides guitar and singing. Kichan rolled the mouse wheel. The list of posts moved down. [Are these actually plant drawings?] [Anyone else see a plant drawing that's not in the Voynich manuscript?] [Heard a rumor the Rohonc copy has a method for making gold in it] [People saying Soyga isn't a cipher, it's sheet music] [Anyone ever read Loagaeth? Is it true you're supposed to read it like a song?] The titles were all sloppy. Sloppy, but strangely entertaining. He opened the second post. From the very first line, the writer insisted they were not a translator. They said they had simply seen it, and somehow heard something strange. It was a ridiculous way to put it. You looked at a picture and heard it?

Kichan snorted.

"What, books do ASMR now?" But there was something odd about the post. The writer said not to look at the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript as plants. The stems looked like roads, they said. The veins of the leaves looked like waterways or sheet music. The roots did not seem to go downward so much as hold on to something. Kichan frowned. The whole thing sounded bizarre, but the wording stuck in his head. He scrolled down. About halfway through, there was a blurry image.

An old botanical sketch drawn on yellowed paper. Lines that might have been roots or blood vessels spread downward, and the leaves opened out on either side like a pair of human lungs. Kichan leaned closer to the monitor. The image was too pixelated to make out clearly. Even so, his fingertips began to tingle. Like after holding down guitar strings for too long. Like some faint vibration had stayed behind in the tips of his fingers. He looked down at his hand.

"What the hell?" Nothing was there. He was probably just tired from getting dumped. He looked back at the screen. At the bottom of the post was a short note.

[Heard something like the original of this drawing still exists in a private collection somewhere in Europe] [Apparently someone saw it in northern Italy at a place disguised as a touristy antiquarian bookshop] [They tell you not to take pictures] [Supposedly if you try to photograph it, it's not that you leave a record of the book—the book recognizes you first] Kichan stared at that for a long time, then gave a dry laugh.

"If books could read people, the publishing industry wouldn't be dying." He said that, but he bookmarked the post anyway. Then he typed flights to Italy into the search bar. The prices were higher than he'd hoped, and he was about to close the window before opening it again. Two layovers. Arrival at dawn. Checked baggage not included. Nonrefundable. Cheap flights always seemed designed to test a human being's will to live, but life itself was nonrefundable, so what was a plane ticket?

Kichan leaned back in his chair and sighed. Going to Italy was not going to change anything. Seeing some weird book was not going to transform him into a different person. Even so, if he stayed home, it felt like he would just keep replaying what he'd heard today. When you play guitar, you look fine. Kichan gritted his teeth.

"Then all I need is to look like I have something going for me when I'm not playing guitar." Even he thought that sounded pathetic. Still, pathetic thoughts sometimes got people moving. He picked up his phone. The banking app asked for his fingerprint once, then opened far too easily. The savings account had an absurdly grand name. Travel Fund. More accurately, it was an account he'd made to save money for a trip with Sooyeon someday.

Money from ordering one less fried chicken, taking one less taxi, setting a little aside on every payday after arguing with himself about it first. Kichan stared at the account name for a while. Once, those two words had seemed pretty nice. Now they were just funny. What kind of travel fund was it when there was no one to travel with? He hit the cancel account button. The app asked if he was really sure. It informed him that the agreed interest rate might not apply if he terminated the account early.

It asked him to confirm one more time. Kichan let out a small laugh.

"You guys really know how to cling." The banking app did not answer. The money transferred into his regular account, and the number got a little bigger. It should have been the kind of number that felt good. Instead it looked like a blank space. Kichan checked the plane ticket price one more time. Then he looked once more at the title of the bookmarked post. [Anyone else see a plant drawing that's not in the Voynich manuscript?] At that moment, the screen flickered. Kichan rubbed his eyes.

The monitor went back to normal. The post was still there. But there was a new comment. It had not been there a moment ago. Anonymous. The message was short. [You're late.] Kichan frowned.

"Late for what?" He refreshed the page. The post disappeared. This post does not exist. Only the plain white error message remained. Kichan froze, hand still on the mouse. His room was quiet. In the living room, the news played softly. In the kitchen, his mother stacked dishes. It was an ordinary night. So ordinary that the comment he'd just seen stood out all the more. Kichan copied the deleted post's URL and pasted it into Notepad. Then he added a line beneath it. Italy. He hesitated, then added one more line.

Find a cheap ticket. Finally he muttered, very softly,"Whatever. Maybe I'll feel better after I go." He still had no idea whether that was true. But that night, for the first time in a long while, Kichan went to sleep without playing guitar. In his dream, someone laughed. It sounded a little like Sooyeon's voice, but not quite. Lower than the laugh he'd heard in the cafe, more like the sound of a guitar string that had just snapped vibrating alone in the dark.

And from very close by, someone pronounced Kichan's name perfectly. It was not Sooyeon. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.