Survival Of The Fittest

((Continued from Anger Wants A Voice, Voices Want To Sing))



“There’s this idea, right, that if you’ve done something bad, you need to make up for it in order to be forgiven.”

After a couple of beers, Jae started rambling. Drinking always made him sleepy, but it also made his tongue loose. He didn’t drink alone, the same way that he didn’t talk out loud to himself. Combine drink with company, then, and it was easy to speak, even if he slurred the words. He’d never been able to completely shut up when conscious, thoughts always running even when he managed to stop his mouth.

Kasey was stretched out on the couch in his sweatpants, laying on his stomach with his arms folded over the side and his chin resting on them. He was similarly tipsy, though probably a little less than Jae. His work schedule meant that he didn’t drink often, but he held his alcohol pretty well. The lights were low in the living room, but a slice of bright yellow emanating from the kitchen nook threw half of it into sharper relief.

Jae sat out of the beam of light's reach, sprawled sideways in a chair in t-shirt and pajama pants, turning a mostly-empty bottle around and around on the side table. He’d showered before dinner, and his hair was still damp, leaving spots on the shoulders and back of his shirt. He had put off washing his hair for a while, stuck between the options of having to let it air-dry or going back to his parents’ house to retrieve a hairdryer. Neither was incredibly appealing under the current circumstances, but he’d eventually settled on the path of laziness.

Their empty plates sat on the coffee table between them; Jae kept meaning to get up to take them to the sink, but the tipsier he got, the less he felt like getting up. He still hurt when he moved in the wrong way, bruises and scrapes he hadn’t even noticed making themselves known.

Kasey hadn’t done anything to prompt Jae to launch into a monologue, but he encouraged it with a mumbled, “Yeah?”

“It’s this idea that’s really, um… religious, in a way. Being forgiven for your sins, and that being the only way you can move forward. That if you’ve done something really bad, then everything you do after that needs to work to make up for it, so you can eventually get forgiveness. It’s kind of like, you can’t ever be a good person again until you get that. It’ll always be on you.”

“Mhmm.” Kasey toyed with a frayed bit of upholstery, nudging him on.

“I don’t really… like that idea,” Jae said haltingly, trying to get his syrupy thoughts together so he could explain them.

“I don’t need that. I don’t want it.” His fingernail caught on the damp label of the beer bottle, and he dragged an uneven tear through the paper as he spoke. “I shouldn’t be forgiven for what I did.

“The people I did it to, or their families or whatever, shouldn’t have to pat me on the head and say it’s okay so that they can move on with their lives. I don’t want a clean slate. I don’t want it to be forgotten.

“You can’t make up for it.” Jae paused to bring in an uneven breath. “There are some things that are done to you that you can’t ever, ever forgive.”

This was probably something he should have said to his therapist, instead of impulsively spilling it all over the person who might be his only actual friend. Jae didn’t like bringing up the island with Dr. Peralta, even with the time that had passed since he’d started therapy. He struggled to explain the ways it still clung to him.

He didn’t dream about the island specifically. His dreams were mostly nonsensical, when he remembered what they were about at all. He didn’t feel like sitting down with a dream journal and trying to assign some symbolism to each thing he remembered. He had nightmares about things catching fire, about his mouth filling up with too many teeth, about being out in public and seeing someone in a crowd who looked exactly like him but never being able to get a clear enough look at them to be sure.

Hazel was there. Her ghost was there. She never spoke. Just looked in on him, once in a while. He still didn’t know why she was the only one who seemed to have never moved on. He could go months at a time without an incident, but he never expected it to be the last time anymore.

“Sometimes you have to- you have to be able to hate, to be angry, if you want to go on. I can’t see how feeling like you’re forced to forgive somebody would help.”

“Yeah,” Kasey said again, quietly. It wasn’t clear if he was just encouraging Jae to go on again or agreeing on a more personal level. Jae kept talking.

“Anyway- I’m not Christian, you know, I don’t believe in a capital-G God. But if there is something like that out there, that’s supposed to be the only one who can actually forgive your sins, then you know, that’s its privilege. Who the hell is here on Earth thinking they have the same power as a god, or a God?”

Kasey shifted on the couch, turning to cradle his head in his hand. “What do you believe in?”

“People have the wrong idea about karma,” Jae said, instead of answering the question directly. “They think it’s just consequences. That you get what you deserve. It’s not that. Or it’s kind of that, but not exactly. It’s the future you make.

“There is no forgiveness, with karma. Just earning your future. And it has to be deliberate. Your intentions and the actions they drive, that’s your karma. No outside force deciding for you. Just you, your actions, and the place you make for yourself in the universe.”

He gave Kasey space to interject, but Kasey just gestured for him to go on.

“It kind of pisses you off, right? The idea that there’s no great justice.”

“I guess. It’d be nice to think that people really do get what they deserve.”

“Yeah.” Jae kept picking at the bottle’s label. “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in Hell. The difference is that the one I believe in has a way out. If there’s no way out, there’s no point. You earn that too.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“I don’t know,” Jae admitted. “It’d be really nice to believe in a heaven where you get everything wiped away in the end. But I don’t. I wasn’t raised to, so it’s easier than if I had been raised to believe, I guess.

“Either way, I’m living with it. I have to keep living with it.”

Jae paused, started to say something else, and then didn’t. He took another sip of beer. It wasn’t very good beer, to be honest.

“And?”

“No ‘and.’ That’s it. I keep living. I keep trying to want to live.”

Kasey was silent for a while, watching him. “I’m glad you’re trying,” he said finally.

The corner of Jae’s mouth twitched. He looked out the window, into the night. The other buildings in Kasey’s apartment complex pressed too close, the lights too bright and artificial. He longed for the open air of the desert, just so he didn’t feel everything pressing in on him on all sides, but they were both too drunk to drive.

“You know, I wanna…” He set the bottle back down and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The catch where skin became scar tissue was familiar under his fingertips. “Sometimes I want to be a dick to you just because you’re nice to me.”

“At least you’re self-aware,” Kasey returned dryly.

“I don’t know why I’m like that. Was like that even before everything happened.”

“Most people don’t know why they are the way they are.”

“Sometimes I just want to tell you that you can’t feel sorry for me, or- or whatever the fuck, because you can’t understand what it’s like to watch people die like that.”

Kasey was silent again, for longer than before. When he spoke, he didn’t sigh, but the quality of it was in his voice. “Jae, I see people die all the time.”

Reality didn’t slap Jae in the face, but it settled heavy on him just the same, like a weighted blanket draped over his shoulders. His drink-hazy mind was slowly and achingly aware of it.

“Yeah.”

It made him feel stupid and selfish, but he needed that reminder sometimes, that his pain wasn’t the only pain in the world.

Kasey didn’t press the issue, and Jae didn’t look back at him, but he could feel him watching.

“When does it get easier?”

Another long pause before Kasey answered. “It doesn’t. You just get used to it.”

Jae turned his gaze away from the window and tipped his head back, instead looking up at the ceiling where beams of light wavered with the movement of the blinds in the air conditioner’s breeze. “You live with it.”

“Yeah.”

Quiet filled the space between them after that, growing too established to break it again. It stayed that way until dawn.

Kasey had been sleeping on the couch for the past week and a half, letting Jae have the bed. It had been his own suggestion; after finding out firsthand how much of a restless sleeper Jae was, Kasey had decided that he didn’t need to be punched and kicked in his own bed. They also didn’t need to have the inevitable awkward conversation about sharing a bed and whether that was cool in the first place, so it was two birds with one stone, really.

Kasey had done some proper couch-surfing for a while after high school. Between that and developing the ability to sleep on just about any surface and in any position while in between calls at the hospital, getting banished to his own living room was downright luxurious. It kept him conveniently central in the apartment as well; Jae didn’t do much wandering around in the night, but Kasey had had some concern early on that he might decide to just get up at a random hour and disappear. It was hard to guess what someone would do in the midst of… you know.

Jae didn’t talk about it, and Kasey didn’t ask. The closest they’d come to broaching the subject at all had been the philosophical ramble Jae had gone on the other night after a few drinks, and that time after ditching Alex’s barbecue when Kasey had helped Jae plaster pictures all over downtown. Even doing that, he had been able to dissociate himself from what he was doing somewhat, from the blank-eyed faces looking back at him.

Kasey didn’t want to know, really. His own life had been coming apart at the seams in the years before Survival of the Fittest hit his hometown, and he’d just barely gotten it on track in time for that to happen. He’d avoided all mention of it like the plague while it was happening. It had felt like the world was ending, even if he hadn’t personally known anybody from Cochise at the time. The lingering implications of it weren’t anything he particularly wanted to dwell on now, either.

Kingman had been rebuilding in the aftermath of its own apocalypse since 2015. These days lately felt like the whole city was holding its breath, waiting to see whose world was going to end next.

The bedroom door was standing open when Kasey dragged himself up off the couch at the sound of his phone alarm. A glance around the living room soon located Jae’s sharp-angled outline though the sliding glass door of the balcony. The balcony itself was sparse, furnished with only a plastic chair and a small table, upon which sat a potted cactus that had stubbornly made it way past its general life expectancy in Kasey’s care. In the dim blue light of early morning, Kasey could make out Jae sitting cross-legged in the chair with his phone balanced on his knee and a cigarette dangling from his fingers.

It looked like he had stolen one of Kasey’s tupperware lids to use as a makeshift ashtray. It was better than dumping his ashes in the cactus pot, at least. The low cadence of Jae’s voice as he spoke to whoever on the phone only penetrated the glass as muffled, unintelligible noise. Kasey left him to it and went to shower.

Jae’s belongings had been steadily overtaking his bathroom counter: makeup bag, hairbrush, and various other assorted products that Kasey could vaguely recall seeing on supermarket shelves and that was about it as far as his familiarity went. He still couldn’t entirely wrap his head around how one person could need so much stuff, but Jae’s parents had dropped a bag of clothes and all of this mess off a couple of days into his stay, and one way or another it seemed to meet his needs. Kasey hadn’t actually seen him in action using most of it because they both had ghoulish sleep schedules. The sight of all of it made him appreciate his own simple routine of “shower, brush teeth, dress, and go.”

Once he had gotten into his work uniform (navy blue shirt and black pants, because everybody in Arizona who designed uniforms for anything acted like they had never heard of the sun), Kasey left his bedroom and crossed the living room again to open the balcony door and stick his head out. He caught a snatch of a feminine voice on Jae’s speakerphone, talking rapidly in what he presumed to be Korean. The phone’s screen, bright in the shady recess of the balcony, displayed the name Yun-hee and a photo of a grinning girl with short, choppy black hair.

“Hang on,” Jae said to the phone when he heard the door slide open. He tapped the screen to put the call on hold and twisted around in the chair to look at Kasey. Yep, eyeliner on even at this hour, even when the rest of him was pajamas and messy ponytail. He raised his eyebrows in silent greeting and question, lifting the cigarette to his mouth.

“You know this complex is no smoking, right?” Kasey asked. They held eye contact while Jae took a long drag, only breaking when he turned his head to exhale a cloud of smoke over the balcony railing.

“I’m outside.”

“I don’t think it counts, actually.” Kasey didn’t care that much; he knew for a fact that his neighbors three doors down were out on their own balcony smoking joints every weekend. Management wasn’t going to do anything unless somebody complained, and so far nobody wanted to snitch. He just didn’t want the interior of his apartment smelling like smoke. “I’m heading to work.”

“There’s food in the fridge,” Jae informed him before he withdrew inside.

Kasey raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, that’s where it normally is.”

“I mean I made actual food, and there’s a plate in the fridge for you. Asshole.” Jae tapped his ashes into the tupperware lid. “Your fridge is a disaster, by the way. I’m going to clean it out later.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Kasey asked, mildly affronted.

Jae gave him a flat look. “You know that can of chili you had in there? The one that was just fucking sitting open, with a spoon in it?”

“I was going to put that in a container.”

“Yeah, after how many days?”

“Fuck off man, you’re living here for free.” Kasey grumped at him, running his fingers through his hair in an embarrassed fidget.

“Sorry for not wanting you to get food poisoning,” Jae retorted. He took another drag and blew another cloud of smoke over the rail. “I’m leaving, anyway.”

“Oh- yeah? You talk to your parents?”

Jae made a vague gesture with the hand not holding the cigarette. The scarred one. He didn’t use it for much, Kasey had noticed; it made it seem more significant when he did. “Yeah, a while ago. I’m supposed to go back to Seoul next week, anyway, so we’re still doing that. They wanted me to come back home for a bit before then.”

“Well… that’s good right?” It seemed like it would be good once it happened, anyway. Him getting out of town. Kingman didn’t seem like a good place for him to be a lot of the time, but especially not right now.

“Yeah,” Jae said after a pause, frowning vaguely out at a building on the other side of the parking lot. He went to lift the cigarette again, noticed how far it had burned down, and instead flicked what was left of it over the rail and onto the pavement below.

“I’ve gotta go,” Kasey said after a minute, when it became clear that Jae wasn’t going to say anything else. “Your call’s still on hold, also.” Jae glanced at the phone and seemed to realize that this was true, and waved him off with a grunt of acknowledgement.

“Don’t forget your food,” was all he said before resuming the phone call and slipping back into Korean, signifying that their conversation was done. Kasey left him to it once more, making sure the sliding glass door was securely closed behind him.

As promised, he found a covered plate of scrambled eggs and toast in the fridge. The offending can of chili had apparently been disposed of. Kasey stood over the sink and shoveled the food directly into his mouth before leaving the dish, and he supposed he would have to rethink his certainty that he would have caught Jae if Jae had decided to sneak out in the middle of the night, since he could evidently cook a whole meal without Kasey noticing.

As he left the apartment and headed down to the parking lot, Kasey paused below the balcony where Jae was sitting, located the discarded cigarette butt, and swept it into the grass with the toe of his work boot to hide it. Just in case someone felt like being nosy later.

---

Jae hadn’t limited his efforts to the fridge. He spent most of the day cleaning the apartment while Kasey was gone, starting in the kitchen and working outward.

He emptied out the fridge and wiped down all of the shelves and drawers. He did the dishes and put them away in the sagging cabinets. He swept and wiped the floor down. He stripped the sheets off the bed and put them in the laundry hamper in Kasey’s closet, and then remade the bed with fresh sheets. He had already packed his clothes away into his overnight bag, along with the rest of his belongings, after showering. He wiped the bathroom down too, clearing away his fingerprints and any stray hairs. He moved through the apartment piece by piece, erasing the evidence that he had ever been there, save for leaving it a little neater than it had been before.

(Was that how he repaid someone’s kindness? Making sure that no traces of it were left after he was gone?)

Kasey worked on a 24-on, 48-off shift schedule. Once he left for the day, he wouldn’t be back before the next morning around 7:30 or 8. It would be a lie to say that Jae didn’t spend a large portion of his hours of cleaning considering whether he should just leave before Kasey got back. His parents had gotten his car back several days ago, but he hadn’t felt like driving, nor arranging things for them to get it to him. They were just waiting on a text from him instead, letting them know that he was ready to be picked up, so he could still go at any time.

He ended up sitting on the bed with the TV on in the afternoon, mindlessly flipping through channels until he found something meaningless that didn’t demand his attention. A dull, constant throb of pain had settled into his left hand and arm from too much use over the course of the day. Jae knew that Kasey had ibuprofen in the bathroom cabinet, but sitting down for a bit had made him realize that he had worn himself out more than he’d thought. He wasn’t used to moving so much in a day.

He’d opened the bedroom window, and warm air drifted in, making the curtains sway. It was only mid-afternoon, but with the warm breeze and the buzz of the TV in the background, Jae’s eyes were closing before he realized it.

He thought he woke when it was dark. He wasn’t sure. The TV was on, throwing harsh light over Jae where he lay sprawled on the bed, still fully-clothed. He couldn’t make out what it was saying. The room didn’t look real. He thought that there was someone standing at the side of the bed, but he couldn’t turn his head to look.

That was all he remembered when he woke again, or woke for real, in the morning.

“Wh- Jesus!”

It was the sound of the front door slamming that initially woke Jae, and then the voice startled him enough to sit up in a disoriented panic, reaching for something at his side but only finding rumpled sheets and his phone. Closing his left hand around the phone shot pain up his arm in protest, which stalled and woke him enough to realize that it was Kasey standing in the doorway of the bedroom, and in turn keep Jae from flinging the phone at him. Kasey looked just as surprised to see Jae as Jae was to see him, even though only one of them clearly didn’t belong here.

“Jesus Christ,” Kasey muttered, smoothing down the front of his uniform shirt. “Gonna give me a heart attack.”

“Sorry,” Jae said hoarsely. His tongue felt weird and dry in his mouth, the piercing in it uncomfortable. He must have been laying asleep with his mouth open like a moron. Morning sunlight was filtering in through the window, and Jae hazarded a glance at his phone once he realized. He groaned when he saw 7:22 AM in uncompromising white letters, just above a notification for three missed calls from his mom.

“Are you good?” Kasey asked, rubbing the back of his head with one hand and awkwardly extending the other as he approached the bed.

“I think so. Shit.” Jae rubbed his face with his free hand and bit back another groan when his fingers came away from his eye smudged black. A glance at the pillowcase confirmed a thick black eyeliner smear on the pale blue fabric. “God fucking dammit.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up, pausing and closing his eyes when the blood rushing from his head made the room swim. “I guess I just- passed the fuck out, I don’t know.” And slept for something like 14 hours. God, he was out of shape.

A touch on his elbow made him jump a little, opening his eyes again to find that Kasey had rounded the bed to come to his side. “I can wash that,” Jae blurted out, referring to the stained pillowcase.

“I can wash it later,” Kasey said, in a tone that didn’t invite argument. “Are you sure you’re good?”

“I think so?” Jae said again, though the last word lifted into a half-question. “...I need to call my parents back. I didn’t mean to crash like that.”

“Better here than somewhere else by yourself.” Kasey dropped his hand from Jae’s arm and stepped back a bit, giving Jae enough space to move around the bed. He’d left his packed bag sitting next to the bathroom door, and after a moment’s consideration, he detoured into the bathroom to wash his face of the makeup smeared around his eyes and onto one cheek. He heard the noise from the TV stop back in the bedroom as Kasey turned it off.

Exiting the bathroom, Jae picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder. Kasey had sat down on the edge of the bed, on the opposite side of where Jae had slept, and was removing his work boots and socks. He glanced back up as Jae stepped out of the bathroom, and they held awkward eye contact for a moment.

“Hey- call me if you want to talk,” Kasey said. “If your phone plan works internationally, and all that.”

Jae blinked at him. “I don’t know when you’ll be at work,” he replied, unsure how to respond.

The side of Kasey’s mouth turned up in a half-smile. It was the same sort of smile that he’d given Jae before loading him into the back of an ambulance a couple of weeks ago, which was to say that it was the sort that told Jae he was an idiot. “Text to see if I’m at work, and if I’m not, call me.”

“...Yeah, okay.”

Jae heaved the strap of his bag further up on his shoulder and shuffled out of Kasey’s apartment, breathing a little easier once he had gotten outside. He waited in the parking lot while he called his parents to say that he’d fallen asleep the previous night and was finally ready to be picked up. He probably could have waited inside, if he’d asked. He didn’t think he ought to ask any more of Kasey for now.

Kingman’s heat was stifling, even early in the morning. Jae was ready to go home.

Hello Mr. Parker

I was wondering if you might be willing to go out for dinner and nice conversation. I know you will say yes because, as a college student, you likely don’t recall the last meal you had that didn’t come in a box.

Jae pulled out his phone, pulled up the email, scowled at it for a minute or two with his thumb hovering over the button to write a reply, and then closed the app and put his phone away in his pocket again. He had done just that probably a couple dozen times over the course of the day, ever since he’d checked his email that morning and found something with an uncomfortably familiar name attached sitting in his school inbox. He didn’t know which school directory he’d forgotten to have his information set to private in, but he was kicking himself for that oversight now.

“Who keeps texting you?” Myung-hee asked. She was more or less leading him down the busy Hongdae street, expertly dodging other pedestrians and window-shoppers with her hand curled around his forearm so that she could stay under the umbrella. It had been rainy for the past week, but he probably would have gotten stuck with the umbrella regardless of weather. Yun-hee had stubbornly maintained a tanned glow with a combination of sun and artificial tanner since their middle school years, but her younger sister was insistent on keeping her fair complexion. Jae got the job of glorified umbrella stand most of the time that he went out with them, thanks to being more than a head taller than both of his female cousins. It would have been preferable to getting stuck with Myung-hee’s shopping bags, but he inevitably had to hold those too while she was browsing and trying things on.

“Nobody,” he replied, turning his attention back to avoiding a collision with anyone else. “I just got an email.”

“Yeah? From who?” Myung-hee was 16 and every bit the annoyance that Jae had made himself to Alex when he had been the tagalong kid cousin. She was obsessed with idol culture right now, and her raincoat and boots were matching opalescent, translucent plastic, the better to show off the frilly blue, off-the-shoulder dress and lacy socks that she wore underneath. She claimed that it made her look just like someone from some girl group that Jae couldn’t remember the name of. She had gotten acrylic nails just a little while ago, baby blue to match her dress, and she was already putting them to use digging into his arm.

“Nobody,” Jae repeated, giving her a sidelong look of irritation, hoping to compel her to drop it. She puffed her cheeks out in returned annoyance but did let the matter rest, for now. Jae shoved his left hand back into the pocket of his windbreaker and let himself be dragged further down the street until another boutique caught Myung-hee’s eye.

Once inside the store, Jae had just enough time to close and shake off the umbrella before Myung-hee foisted her existing bags onto him. He arranged them on his arms alongside the umbrella and shuffled over to the front corner of the store to wait, thinking with resignation about how the store employees probably saw a put-upon boyfriend rather than a chaperoning cousin. He stood there for just a few minutes before giving in to the urge to look over the email again.

There was an impulse to retort to it that he’d been having very good home-cooked meals at his aunt and uncle’s house, some of which he’d made himself, thanks, but he put the brakes on that train of thought before he could even start typing. Had to moderately ration out those opportunities to show his ass to a total stranger.

After several more minutes of looking at the cursor blinking in the email window on his phone screen, Jae finally began formulating a response. Hi, he began, before erasing it and typing out Hello, and then deciding that didn’t look right either. “Hey” was far too casual, but everything else felt artificial. Eventually, he decided to forego greetings or pleasantries altogether and cut straight to the point.

I’m in Seoul, so if you want to meet me, you’ll have to come here.

Jae paused with his finger over “send” for a moment and then added another line.

Don’t tell the media or whoever that you’re coming.

Min-jae

((Continued in Talking to the Ghost of Who I Knew))

Thanks to Ruggahissy for providing the email.