A man, about my height or a little taller, with a thin build and unusually long arms and legs, had his back to me and was busily moving between the arranged paintings. His heavy, laced-up work boots, the kind a punk rock band might wear, were striking.
“Excuse me…”
“Agh! Shit, you scared me!”
I thought I had made enough noise coming down the stairs, but he must have been so engrossed in his work that he didn’t hear me. Even though I called out carefully, the man was startled and even stumbled.
The man who turned around had a face as unique as his attire. It was a mask that gave off a distinctive vibe, hard to categorize as handsome or ugly. Bangs perfectly trimmed into a straight line, long enough to poke his eyes, further accentuated his individuality. He had a face you could never forget after seeing it once.
The woman I met upstairs also seemed to have two or three piercings on her face, but this guy had even more accessories. His exposed ears were densely adorned with ring earrings of various sizes, like a spiral notebook, and he also had piercings in his eyebrows, nose, and lips. A thin chain connecting the ring piercing in the center of his lower lip to the piercing in his eyebrow caught my eye.
Neither the woman upstairs nor this person in front of me looked like the gallery staff that people generally imagine. Not even close. But the two of them exuded a remarkably similar vibe.
Two black figures with a distinct presence, as if outlined with a felt-tip pen, in a space that was all white.
The man, who had stopped working and was looking at me with his hands on his hips, looked a little fierce. He must have been waiting for me to introduce myself.
“Section Chief Han… sent me. The employee upstairs told me to come down to the basement and help.”
“Ah… really? I thought… our CEO always says there’s a ghost in this basement.”
Perhaps embarrassed by how startled he had been a moment ago, the man said that while fiddling with the piercing in his lip.
“I’m picking out the paintings to be moved upstairs. If I find a painting on the list, you move it over here.”
The man pointed to the paintings gathered separately near the entrance and led the way into the inner space.
The man checked the list and identified the area where the painting was located. A-1,2,3… B-1,2,3… The areas were systematically separated, so it wasn’t difficult to find the paintings. It was a battle against time and labor.
When the man found a painting, I moved it to the entrance. In the meantime, the man would find the next painting. That’s how it worked.
“But, what’s your relationship with Section Chief Han? She wouldn’t have hired someone from some part-time job site this late at night.”
There had been no small talk at all while we were working, but as he checked the moved paintings one more time, he asked me a personal question for the first time.
“I’m a housekeeper at her newly moved house. She said the gallery was busy today and asked me to help.”
“Ah, the housekeeper she recently hired…”
I nodded towards him as he stared at my face again.
“I didn’t know he was so young. What’s your name? We should at least know each other’s names, even if it’s just for one night. I’m Kwon Juhan.”
“Seo Yeehyeon.”
He was kneeling in front of a painting, and I was holding the corner of the canvas to prevent it from falling over. We shook hands belatedly.
“We’re only working together for one day, let’s just call each other Juhan and Yeehyeon.”
I nodded again in agreement with his suggestion.
He dusted off his knees and stood up. Now we had to move the paintings upstairs. There were a total of 24 pieces, including large works that looked to be over 120 hp in size. They were works and products that would be exhibited and sold from tomorrow. To handle them with care, we decided to carry them together, except for the very small ones.
“I’m one thing, but you look just as frail… These are quite heavy. Don’t drop them, no matter what. Please be careful. If you drop them, our CEO won’t let you live, Yeehyeon.”
To move the first piece, we positioned ourselves on either side of the canvas. As if imagining the scolding he might receive from the CEO, Juhan lightly warned me, but he himself shuddered.
Juhan went up the stairs first, and I carefully followed behind him. The exhibition hall was on the second floor, so there were quite a few stairs leading up from the basement. On the landing leading from the first to the second floor, Juhan signaled to stop for a moment.
“Do you… work out? You’re stronger than you look… You’re, okay.”
“I’ve worked part-time for a moving company.”
His gaze examined me again, as if looking for traces of strenuous physical labor.
We didn’t look that different in terms of physique, but carrying heavy loads up and down stairs was something I did almost every day these days. It wouldn’t be strange if I had gotten the hang of it.
“If it’s heavy, should I hold it from above next time? It seems harder for you to walk backwards.”
“No. It’s not heavy. It’s just that I’ve already moved about 30 pieces today… I’m not usually like this. Let’s go again.”
Juhan, still catching his irregular breath, lifted the painting again with his thin, long arms, where the joints stood out sharply.
And as soon as we arrived on the second floor and carefully put the painting down, he collapsed on the floor.
“Agh, I can’t do it anymore! I moved 30 pieces by myself today! My legs are shaking!”
He shouted and hit the floor while lying down, but the woman with the bobbed hair didn’t even look in his direction and began to unpack the painting we had just moved.
It was a work that expressed stacks of old books in a hyperrealistic style. Judging from the texture of the cross-section, it didn’t seem to be made with paint alone.
“Over there. There’s a paper that says number 1, right? It has to be hung on that wall. Let’s lift it together.”
She wasn’t very tall, but she seemed to know everything that was going on here. So, she didn’t seem likely to make a mistake by misjudging whether she could lift the canvas based on its size.
As expected, there was no problem for her and me to lift a work whose vertical height was similar to my height. As the foreman said, to some extent, it wasn’t a matter of strength but of skill.
“Baek Yuni… you’re so strong… When did you hang all the pieces in Zone B by yourself again? I told you to just leave them.”
Juhan, still lying on his back looking at the ceiling, only turned his head to watch us hang the painting. Come to think of it, the mess in the area next to where she was working when we arrived here had been neatly cleaned up.
“I only did what I could. You two do the rest later. I have to match the captions for the works in Zone B now.”
“Okay.”
Juhan, who had declared that he couldn’t do it anymore, got up as if he had recharged and grabbed a bottle of ion drink from the temporary workbench and twisted the cap. I wasn’t very thirsty, but he offered me a bottle, so I took a few sips.
“But did you say hello to Yeehyeon? You didn’t, did you? You just said, ‘Do this, do that,’ as soon as you saw her, didn’t you?”
She was arranging the captions with information such as the title of the work, the materials used, and the year of production on the workbench in her own order. While saying that, she stopped for a moment and turned to look at me. I don’t know if it was my imagination, but she looked slightly apologetic.
“Baek Yuni.”
“Seo Yeehyeon.”
This is a pencil, and that is a desk.
Juhan, who was watching our bland greetings like the sentences that often appeared as examples when learning English for the first time, chuckled from across the room, his shoulders shaking.
“It’s worth watching people who are shy with each other doing that. Call each other Yuni and Yeehyeon. That’s what we decided to do with me too.”
It wasn’t surprising at all that he judged me to be shy. I didn’t look like someone who was sociable to anyone. I was aware of that much. But Juhan’s assessment of her was unexpected.
Does she, who has an impression like Gothic letters that someone has written firmly and clearly, ever feel like she’s the only one drifting alone among people, like me? It was hard to imagine.
“Shut up. I can transform into a god of sociability if I put my mind to it.”
“That’s true. It’s just that it’s not just a god, it’s a machine. You have no soul when you’re selling.”
Yu-ni was looking down at the captions, and the two of them didn’t notice because they were talking, but I, who was standing facing the stairs, couldn’t help but notice the new presence.
Starting with the light, fluttering, thin hair, a face with distinct and deep features was revealed, and a man in a stylish suit quickly stepped onto the second-floor lobby. He was a very… very big and glamorous man.
“What else would you put your soul into sales for? The soul is what the artists put into their works.”
Yuni said sharply, placing the last caption in its place. The large man was standing right in front of the workbench where we were gathered.
“Well said.”
The man suddenly joined the conversation with a smiling face.
“CEO!”
Yuni’s face and voice were full of joy as she called the man that.
Ah, that’s the gallery CEO that Juhan was talking about. The one who scared Juhan by saying that there was a ghost in the underground storage.
He was very tall. He also had a great physique, but he was so sleek that he didn’t look clumsy at all, despite his impressively tall height and broad shoulders. His exotic face, which at first glance seemed like that of a foreigner, had a slight oriental feel when viewed up close.
“Ah, why are you only coming now?”
“You know those two. They wouldn’t let me go under the pretext of a reservation.”
He was a very large and very handsome man. His exotic appearance, which would be impossible unless he was of mixed race, gave him a glamorous and special feeling. That seemed to set the man apart from his surroundings. I guess this is what it’s like to be someone who exists as an object of people’s gaze, not someone who looks at someone….
I had that thought for the first time in my life.
Is this what a golden alpha is like?
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