As a girl, eight, nine-years-old, when Hyun would wake from a nightmare in her small radiator damp bedroom, glowing stars on the ceiling in an invented constellation she’d named Libra Minor, she wouldn’t call out. They lived in a third-floor walkup, a three-flat, and her window overlooked a slim vacant lot lit by two security lamps installed by an absentee owner. These lamps obscured the sky. Of course, it was all of Chicago’s light that polluted her night view, but Hyun placed the blame on these sentinel lamps. Hyun would put her head against the cold window, looking out at the lot, unable to remember the events of her nightmare and try to calm down; that was how the ritual began. Making herself as still as she could, she’d imagine her dad walking into the room. She knew that she had to be absolutely still for it to work. And a minute, three, not more than ten minutes later, there he was. He’d come in the room and each time she’d play dumb, “How did you know?” and each time he’d say “I could hear you crying.” But she knew the truth. She knew that if she wanted something to be real, she could make it so. And while her certitude had faded, she still had moments, despite all of life happening to her like it does to everyone, where she remembered what was possible.
In full winter walking home in blue dusk, mounds of snow fronting low buildings and huddled tightly on the street and no snow falling, Hyun came to know that at the end of her block, in a courtyard building similar to her own, and unlike the three-flat of her youth, on the rattling warm top floor, the third floor, there was an unlocked door that led to an apartment that she would find empty. That she would find empty except for a radiator clanging wetly in the living room, hissing in the bathroom, the dining room, and both bedrooms. She was sure, certain in a way she could faintly remember.
She had plans for dinner with a man she’d gone on one date with, a man from her recent past, friend of a friend, that she had suspected was not interested. She was planning on canceling. She would cancel. During their first date the man had spent dinner guessing at her, trying to land on a topic that held her attention. She didn’t want to be guessed at. She wanted a man that knew her without trying. She’d spent the day wandering a university library that due to some clerical error she was still able to access, and now she was walking home. She was a woman walking home in blue dusk from the library with two books who came to receive the knowledge of the unlocked door in the way one half-glimpses a red bird high in a distant tree, and with each step becomes more certain of its color, its physical reality, its beauty and wholeness. That was how the fact of the unlocked door was revealed to her.
But when she reached the door to enter the building, the building that was familiar but not her own, that door was locked. She took off her brown mittens and stood for a moment outside exhaling vapor. She turned from the front door and looked into the blue night, the blued snow everywhere, round haloed lights spotting this courtyard. Tiny auras hanging. An empty Tuesday here. Her vision, she was willing to use the flimsy word, had not included any insight into the door that led from the outside world. It occurred to her that science fiction was happening to her. Her wandering had been dream-like and had led her into the state she was in.
Hyun could wander this courtyard for longer than most without fear of drawing suspicion. This was her instinct. She might have been wrong. Her reasoning was that she was not far from Loyola, her alma mater that was unknowingly providing her library access indefinitely, and not far from Northwestern; she was holding library books, and she was Korean, though she was born three miles from this courtyard. People often assumed she was a student, and believed she was much younger than her actual thirty-six years.
If someone asked what she was doing in the courtyard, she’d say she was studying the building. That it was famous. A particularly unique example of a U-shaped courtyard build from the 1910s. If pressed for what was unique about the building, she’d gesture towards the roof and walk away.
Hyun was willing to break the law to enter the building. She was willing to lie. She was willing to risk getting caught and then lie. She felt like she might have to go to the bathroom. Standing in the growing night she exhaled again largely. And again. The cold was emptying her out.
She buzzed the third floor, she buzzed all the third-floor buzzers. There were four for each floor. An east and west set. She waited. She knew she was walking to the left and then up two flights. East. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was she knew which way to go and was willing to do anything to get there. A man’s voice replied through the talk box.
“Who is it?”
“UPS.”
“For who?”
Hyun looked at the numbers that corresponded to the buzzers she had pressed.
“Says 302.”
Hyun was buzzed into the building. This, for her, was equivalent to space travel. As she climbed the stairs she thought of a serial killer she had recently heard described on a podcast. A man that walked around neighborhoods trying doors until he reached one that was unlocked, and then would enter and kill whomever he found inside. How after the killings, neighbors of the victims would often report having seen a man who had tried to get into their own homes. How they had watched a man trying windows, door knobs, back porches. How they’d watched as the man calmly attempted to gain access to their home, from all entry points, failed, and went on his way. Locked doors, locked windows, and on to the next. It was much worse to imagine this killer as calm. It was worse to imagine any killer as calm. Hyun thought despite the news, despite TV, most people adhere to the rules of polite society. It’s true. Aberrations stand out. Calm faces surround us. That’s what makes it scary. Calm faces kill, steal, betray, put children in cages, become astronauts, have visions about unlocked doors.
As Hyun climbed the stairs she wondered if anyone was watching her from inside an apartment, looking out the peephole to see who it was ascending the stairs, who it was that had buzzed. If someone watching would later report her for something that was about to happen. The science fiction feeling was still with her. If someone asked her what she meant, sitting next to her at a bar, she would have said, “It’s the feeling.” And the feeling of remembering what is possible in this life, what actually can happen and be willed into existence, remembering that, even briefly on an unfamiliar staircase, felt like light pouring out of her.
Before Hyun reached the top floor, the third floor, a large old white man was standing sweating in the doorway of 302, nearly overlooking the stairs from the threshold of his apartment. He had an enormous head and wore very small round glasses. She thought, “gamemaster,” but did not know where that came from. The man had a small cream-colored hand towel over his shoulder. He spoke to her with a lilting voice that didn’t seem to match the one that had come through the talk box.
“You see UPS?” he asked.
“I did.”
“Big package?”
“Heavy, yeah.”
The round old man lost interest and shut his door at the word “heavy.”
At the top of the landing Hyun turned so that 302 was on her right, the stairs leading down on her left. There was only one other apartment near the front of the building. 303. One door. This was the door she had seen. She walked to the door and tried the handle. It was locked. She closed her eyes. She tried the handle again, turning it the opposite direction, and the door opened.
The apartment was similar to her own, but empty. Completely unfurnished. The kitchen, small, an afterthought. A fireplace that had been bricked over and painted black. Ungrounded outlets. Old wood flooring. Hyun knew nothing about wood, about floors, about fireplaces, being a neighbor, how to make herself happy, how to enjoy her work life, how to be a good daughter, a good wife, a good sister, good girlfriend, how to make friendships last, date, how to not live with regret, fear, how to have a healthy sex life, how to learn new skills, she knew no language other than her native one, English, she had no head for numbers, no science, couldn’t identify several large countries on a map even if offered quadruple her yearly salary, and was in general, moody. Her family loved her. Her friends loved her. She was loved. The type of person you ached to make truly laugh. She was good with computers, she was charming, she dressed tastefully, not loud. She would never be fired from any job she held. She knew what many people of her generation did. Movies. Tertiary characters on prestige television shows. The birthplaces of actors. Restaurants. How to tastefully and stylishly consume news. Where to buy the things she should want to buy in order to efficiently shape others’ perception of her. She knew the history of organizational movement for several American professional sports teams because she had spent one afternoon on the subject years ago. Rochester Seagrams, Rochester Royals, Cincinnati Royals, Kansas City-Omaha Kings, Kansas City Kings, Sacramento Kings. She’d stunned men with this trick. She had an excellent memory. Had the names of constellations and trees and flowers instantly. She cooked well but without great ambition. Could believably lie without effort. She knew how to surprise people. It took so little.
Hyun walked around the empty apartment. Her steps were loud in the living room. Floor creaking, steps echoing. She left wet footprints. She did not say anything. She felt she might be seen through one of the windows. Seen from across the courtyard, or as she moved deeper in the apartment, from the alley below. There were no blinds, no shades. No religious thought occurred to her. A flat midwestern sky, a lake like an ocean that was not the ocean, growing up with those blue plains made God seem so much less likely. Chicago was godless and that was, in part, what made it beautiful to her. Full of churches, vacant lots, libraries and godless; she thought anyone could see this. The door to the second bedroom was closed. She tried the handle. Locked. She closed her eyes and tried twisting the opposite way. Still locked.
She waited to receive a new vision in front of the locked door. She set her two books down on the floor. Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun and The Path to Power by Robert Caro.
Hyun had considered arriving to her second date in a t-shirt and sweatpants with her two library books. Taking off her winter coat in the restaurant and revealing that outfit. Acting as if she was emerging from a fugue state, claiming that she remembered she needed to be at the restaurant at this time, but not why. A third date would be difficult for him after that. She would cancel. She wanted to be known, not guessed at. Wanted someone who knew she didn’t want to be asked on a date. A man who knew better than that. A man who would appear and know what to do. She thought, I will manifest such a man; she did not want to forget what she was able to do again.
She considered not going into the bedroom. Picking up her books and going home. Maybe the date wouldn’t be as bad as she’d imagined. No, she wanted to learn what was going to happen. This was her choice. She hit the door with her shoulder. It opened.
Inside the room was a chair upholstered to look like night sky, full of stars. There were no constellations she could see; a chaotic and beautiful scattering. A void chair. Hyun smiled. She could sit here and read. She went to the window and could see tire tracks striping the alley, slosh in their wake. She took off her winter jacket and tossed it to the ground. She took off her boots and wiggled her toes in thick maroon socks. She pulled her hair back as if about to put it in a ponytail, but then released it, nothing held her hair. She picked up the Mun and held the book in her hand as she sat down in the chair like night sky. She closed her eyes. Her stomach dropped. She felt chilled and was unable to open her eyes. This was not painful.
She was standing in a bathroom. She was wearing a ribbed mustard colored sweater tucked into highwaisted Levi’s. She was barefoot. She didn’t know what was happening. Wherever she was now, she was lost.
The bathroom was tiled yellow, the toilet, also yellow, appeared to be sitting too low. Still, this was an American bathroom. In a drawer she found Gleem toothpaste. In a tray next to the sink was an orange bar of Dial soap. The same in the shower. Hyun walked to the window next to the toilet, then remembered the book she’d been holding and could not find it anywhere in the bathroom. She did not know what this meant. The window was slightly ajar and outside the night was buzzing. Hyun was in the green American suburbs. Cicadas, but the night was not warm. She could hear a car passing. Early fall. She was on the second floor of this home. She put her head near the open window and shouted “IS THIS SPACE?” She received no response. There were mature trees outside: hackberry and oak, and dogwood up next to the house. Other houses nearby. The suburbs, somewhere. She believed that’s where she was. Ohio. Indiana. Nebraska. Wisconsin.
She looked in the mirror and found she looked like herself. Same hair, same face, same age. The clothes made her look younger, but maybe only because in her mind these clothes were a costume. She did not own any sweaters in this color.
She used the bathroom, did not flush, and walked barefoot onto the thick shag carpet on the landing. There were three other doors; she guessed three bedrooms. She went downstairs. The house seemed like one that had a cat living in it, but she saw no cat. There was no music playing and no TV noise. She could hear someone on the first floor at the kitchen sink. She walked slowly into the brown and yellow kitchen. Hyun could only see his back: a black man in his mid-thirties wearing a flannel shirt was doing dishes. She did not know him.
“Who were you yelling to?” he asked without turning around.
“Couldn’t say really.”
“If you want to see the movie, we have to get going. We’re going to be late.”
Hyun said, “I’m ready.” She walked up to this man and almost placed her hand on his back, but stopped herself. She was not that great an actor. He turned to her and she did not know him, it was confirmed at close range. He looked familiar and anonymous but most notably had an incredibly sympathetic face. There were many lines under his eyes and these indicated not age but instead that he had a willingness to listen. That he would nod, smile, encourage, and frown in the grandmotherly way you’d hope for. Not that this mode of listening was his constant state, but standing in front of this man, Hyun saw it was his first instinct. His expression gave away nothing else beyond that he seemed to know Hyun. He didn’t ask her anything. He was not threatening. Hyun was reminded of a young dad that lived in her building; a man that she knew had volunteered to coach his niece’s basketball team and did so occasionally with his own daughter strapped to his chest in a baby carrier. The baby would clap, seemingly cheering on both teams and everyone watching. Hyun had been shown a picture on a phone by the man’s wife in their building’s courtyard one evening. It was a team picture, the girls in green jerseys and the man, the volunteer coach, with his own daughter in a tiny green shirt on his chest in a carrier. Everyone smiling and the baby with her hands in the air, fingers spread as if rejoicing. Anyway that was who this man in the kitchen brought to mind.
On the refrigerator was a calendar with neat slashes through days past, and if the slashes were correct, “Is this calendar right? The year?”
“What kind of question is that?” the man said, warmly.
If the slashes were correct, the date was September 8, 1960. The date was circled on the calendar. The man did not seem to be from 1960.
She did not know what this man knew. She walked from the kitchen into the living room. She felt sick to her stomach; lost in way she could not explain. A TV with an antennae. Two orange recliners. A brown couch. Lamps. No overhead lighting. She scanned the bookshelf. She wanted to see if the Mun had traveled. She scanned the shelves saw Cheever, Reader’s Digest, no Mun. Dick Groat on the cover of Sports Illustrated on the coffee table. Hyun did not know if the Pittsburgh Pirates were ever based elsewhere.
The man said enough about the movie for Hyun to understand they were about to see Psycho. The man had memorized one line from a review of the movie he’d read, “The trail leads to a sagging, swamp-view motel and to one of the messiest, most nauseating murders ever filmed,” and Hyun must have flinched because he changed the subject to candy, popcorn, butter decisions. Hyun gave quiet answers to his questions because she was lost and felt saying too much about anything could increase that feeling. She was trying to place herself and in doing so fell silent. The man fell silent too; the car ride was not tense, not charged. Hyun was drifting and this was only possible, she realized later, because the man was an attentive and focused driver and unconcerned with being recognized as such. Roadside signs and businesses let her know they were in Cedar Rapids. She had borrowed a pair of the man’s shoes after she told him she didn’t know where her own were, which he didn’t seem to find as strange as he should have. He’d even given her options, laid three pairs down side by side on the kitchen linoleum and let her pick. She chose brown boots. Her feet fidgeted in the boots as they neared the small downtown and the theater. The line for the movie wrapped around the block. A man in a paper hat was holding a sign near the end of the line that said:
TONIGHT’S SHOWING
SOLD OUT.
They drove past the long line, and then the man spun a u-turn to head back to the house. He mumbled an apology, sounding embarrassed. She was trying not to watch him. She did not know if he thought she was someone else. Or if he was assigning past conversations to her, or knowingly giving her a role he hoped she’d fill. Or if she actually was filling a role.
Hyun asked, “Are you going to see it another time?”
He looked at her, “Oh, I’ve seen it.”
Something snapped in her; she needed to know what was happening. Hyun mimed knifing the man to death from the passenger seat, like in the movie, making the sound too, like the famous shower scene. The man had no reaction and then started laughing. He cleared his throat and gently leaned into the gas pedal, saying “Alright, OK.”
The man parked in his detached garage and they began making their way back into the house. She could see a light was on in a bedroom upstairs. Hyun smiled nervously and then exhaled to get control when the man didn’t notice her expression. She was walking duck-footed in his boots. She could hear his breathing. She noticed several stark bright porchlights burning from surrounding houses. The lights clear in the cold air. They stepped inside the dark house. Inside, the man did not immediately turn on any lights. They stood together in the entryway in the dark. The man was hanging up his coat and then the one he’d let Hyun borrow. Hyun was suppressing laughter, but was also scared. It occurred to her that maybe he was from somewhere else too. She would not ask. She paid attention to the man’s breathing and his inattention to her as he went about hanging up the coats, his comfort with the silence and standing so near her, nearer now as he reached for another hanger, in this home that she assumed was his own. The man lit a cigarette as he walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
“What’s your brand?” Hyun said, following at a distance.
It was as if he hadn’t heard her. From the refrigerator he said to Hyun, earnestly, “I hope you find what you are looking for.” Something about him speaking to her in this way made Hyun afraid. He wasn’t threatening her, but she was getting scared. Maybe she should know how she should be acting. He seemed to know. And he seemed to know her. She should be brave. She stepped towards the man and again mimed knifing him, standing in front of the open refrigerator, making the noise again, herhz-herhz-herhz, louder this time. He had a gently exasperated look on his face. He continued smoking his cigarette and said, “Is it OK if we go home?”
This scared her. She realized she knew nothing. She ran into the living room turning on lights as she went. She screamed but not out of fear. She was alive and would keep living. Continue making real what she had in her head. Continue making mistakes. She was not going to die. Not in Iowa 1960. She ran through the house. The man was following after her, in this house it now seemed obvious was not his own. He stumbled over a chair she’d turned over and splayed out on the floor, bleeding from his nose. Hyun waited until she was sure he was down and then stood over him and nudged him with her foot. He grunted but did not move.
She didn’t know the rules but it seemed that there must be more than one way out. She knew she would get where she needed to go. She would. She ran outside into Iowa, 1960, and looked up at the stars, said to the stars, “Be the chair, be like chair,” and felt her stomach drop, and was back in the apartment, similar to her own, in her maroon socks and gray shirt.
The bleeding man was there too.
Splayed out in Chicago, present day, he was bleeding at her feet. Blood pooling from his nose and clothed differently. Why had what happened to Hyun also happened to the man? She nudged him with her socked foot and to her surprise, he looked up at her wearily. Apologetically. He smiled with blood rimmed teeth. She inhaled. She ran. Leaving her coat, leaving her boots in the room with the bleeding man. Out of the apartment. She knocked on 302 as she ran past, thundering down the stairs. Ran without a coat, ran out into winter. Her breathing was scattered and wild. Running out of the courtyard in socks, she remembered she’d left her library copy of The Path to Power, a book she would never read, in the room with the bleeding man. The Mun had not come back; it had traveled and stayed. What that meant for this present world, she couldn’t say. But here she was. Here she was running, remembering what it was she could do. She would not forget. She turned and looked back at the building, U-shaped courtyard, familiar, but more brick than her own, more landscaping, ornately barred lower windows. She stopped. She stood in her maroon socks soaked. Snow mounded, cars encased, no new snow falling. Her keys were in her coat pocket in the room with the bleeding man. There were doors she needed keys for. And the man, the man, how did she know he was a threat? What had he done that was threatening? She stood in her socks in winter sad to understand she couldn’t leave him behind. He knew her. He’d let her choose boots and he hadn’t guessed at her, had stopped talking and let her determine what was what. He’d allowed her to sit and say nothing. Allowed her to pretend to knife him to death, twice, how wonderful. He was what was possible though she hadn’t believed it. He’d been willing to listen and she had nothing to say. And he was like Hyun, a person traveling; he’d given her the benefit of the doubt. She would do the same for him. He’d required nothing of her. No proof. No questions. There was no science fiction to it at all, was there. Every day she woke into a reality she couldn’t explain, met people she couldn’t explain, couldn’t understand, was there any alternative? He was a stranger traveling in an unfamiliar place, by an unfamiliar method, same as her, same as everyone; waking into the reality we are given. And she’d run from him. She began making her way back to the door. Familiar but not her own. She reached the downstairs buzzer, pressed 303, was not asked anything, and was buzzed in.