Untroubled by clouds, the bright expanse of the evening sky spread out across the city. The entrance to the theatre building was a door at street level made entirely of glass. Hanging up the phone, Ayami gazed out at the gathering dusk, the red flare of the day’s last light. Directly across the alley, a shabbily dressed middle-aged couple were looking over at the theatre. Every time a car drove down the narrow alley, the woman took a step back, onto the low paving slabs, where she balanced precariously until the vehicle had passed. Neither she nor the man seemed able to tear their gazes from what had caught their interest – the noticeboard by the entrance, where details of performances were posted.
For all intents and purposes they were an ordinary couple out for an evening stroll, or maybe primary school classmates who’d met up again after a forty-year gap. Every time the woman looked up and her unnaturally black hair fell back from her face, Ayami noticed pockmarks stamped here and there onto her dark skin. The man lifted a calloused hand and pointed at something on the noticeboard. Perhaps they’d realised that the final performance had been held that day. The woman was shaking her head, in what appeared to be a gesture of regret. Might they be my parents? This thought struck Ayami in a flash, then trailed off into the distance.
‘It’s strange,’ she heard the woman muttering. ‘How come we never knew this theatre was here? They need a proper sign, not just some notice stuck up like this. If you’re not up close it just looks like a Buddhist temple or a cram school!’
When the man moved close to the woman and whispered something in her ear, she rested her head on his shoulder and giggled childishly. Ayami studied his slight frame; might he be her father, a fruit hawker who’d claimed a distant connection to the mayor of Seoul?
For a while, the couple seemed to forget the theatre that had appeared so abruptly in their lives.
They glanced up at the sky simultaneously.
The heat, the flat plane of the sky, were unchanging. There was no sign of rain.
‘I wonder what’s inside?’ the woman murmured as she peered through the glass door, drawn to the place without knowing why. The man followed her gaze, though he had no knowledge of audio equipment to speak of, and precious little interest in anywhere calling itself an audio theatre. They seemed not to see Ayami on the other side of the door.
‘Look, it says there’s a library and an audio appreciation room. “Audio-appreciation room” – do you think that’s the same as a music-appreciation room? No, but look at this, it says it’s closed down! And we never even had the chance to take a look around.’
They started moving away, perhaps intending to head home, but almost immediately stopping again. They looked hesitant, as though wondering where they should go. Turning to face the man, the woman stared up at him with such intensity that furrows creased her brow.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you won’t really leave me like you wrote in that letter, will you?’
Her skirt fluttered like an old dishcloth in the alley’s still air, exposing a pair of skinny calves corded with stringy muscle, pathetically small feet, and shoes that gleamed like new yet looked like cast-offs.
A single line of sweat trickled down from her hairline and over her cheeks. The smell of overripe fruit, cigarettes, damp laundry and fish wrappings wafted from beneath her skirt.
Rather than being some state-of-the-art space, the ‘audio-appreciation room’ consisted of a CD tower and a pair of headphones over on one side of the library. People would stand and listen to recordings before deciding whether to borrow them or not; nothing that really warranted such a grand title as ‘audio appreciation’.
Might they be my parents? Ayami wondered again.
In the two years she’d worked there, Ayami had never taken a holiday, outside the one week in August when the theatre officially closed. For that week, when the humidity was generally at its peak, the foundation suspended all its various operations, disconnected its telephone lines, and gave every one of its employees the full seven days off. At this time of year, the city was like an animal being slowly smothered beneath a heap of steaming earth.
Crematorium smoke belched out from the hot asphalt covering every inch of soil, and from the enormous structures of concrete, iron and glass that towered into the sky, and whole streets became cratered balls of fire, with all kinds of animal matter – exposed flesh, skin, eyeballs, hair, sweat – burning up. Merely turning your face in a certain direction was enough for a storm of flaming arrows to inflict lethal burns. Thousands of stars exploded simultaneously. Meteors blazed, gas combusted, and the vault of the heavens was plastered with dark ash. All light was shut out in this dawn of night. But the heat didn’t abate. At night, the viscous fibres knitting flesh together, underpinning the body’s structures, slackened still further, fluttering and whirling around the edge of consciousness. The DNA sequences coding sleep’s cellular identity unravelled, and dreams mingled with comatose states as cell membranes disintegrated. It was the time of the year when sleep was stretched thinnest, like oxygen at a high altitude. Yet it was also a time governed by a colloid of dreams in which gravity and density were most intense. In dreams Ayami would clutch a huge parrot to her breast, and in reality she would crawl into a non-existent bathtub brimming with cold water and fall asleep. The parrot dug its claws into her chest and produced a drawn-out shriek. The extremes of heat within the city, exacerbated by the artificially chilled air, were both sorrowful and transcendent. The midsummer metropolis was a temple of benumbed languor, the home of long-vanished, cult-worshipping tribes. Rarefied sleep sucked bodies into a burning crater lake choked with sticky flakes of black soap ash and honeycomb chunks of grey pumice. In cramped rooms unrelieved by air conditioning or even a fan, if you opened the window hot air heavier than a sodden quilt rushed in, clagging your pores like the wet slap of raw meat, but with it closed the oxygen would quickly evaporate, disappearing at a frightening rate until the air was filled with nothing but heat. Nothing but the ecstasy of ruin. August beds were pillars of hot-water vapour belched up from a bog, which held the memory of a female ancestor. An empire of agonising visions drifted up from its bubbling surface and floated over the city. These visions encroached on the dreams of its inhabitants. Air hotter than the heat of midsummer solidified into transparent bullets, penetrating one heart after the other, travelling between them with excruciating slowness. At every moment, the crystallisation of invisible wax ruptured skin and perforated flesh. Smouldering hunks of flesh. Mucous membranes ragged with burns. Breathing was a train headed for disaster. Every time the city dwellers fell asleep their bodies became cruelly soaked in sweat, like tinder doused with lighter fluid. They burned without flames through the long hours of the night. When the noonday sun was at its zenith, He drank a fridge-chilled beer, and She ate some cucumber. Now and then they switched on the boxy yellow radio, but all they ever heard was a weather report. The male announcer read the report extremely slowly, drawing out each monotonous syllable. Daytime. Air temperature. Thirty. Degrees. Celsius. Absence. Of wind. Absence. Of shade. Danger. Of fire. Thirty. Degrees. Absence. Of wind. Absence. Of shade. Daytime. City. Mirage. Scheduled. To appear. Melting. Of asphalt. And. Tyres. Absence. Of wind. Absence. Of cloud. Absence. Of mucous membrane. Danger. Of fire. Absence. Of colour. In the sky. And air … The candle left out on the windowsill had melted without ever having been lit; the wax collapsed pathetically under the sun’s fierce rays, its shape suggesting the peculiar way love concludes. By the time the heatwave came to an end, nothing remained of the people but ash. They became fused into panes of glass: grey and opaque.