1. One by One
■ SEOUL ■
After finishing a light meal of roast beef sandwiches with whole grain mustard and kabocha squash, Liu stood up from the table, offering to make pour-over coffee himself as a token of his gratitude for the dinner.
“Wow, this is more serious than I thought. And from someone who’s such a wizard at organizing data.”
Opening the cabinet above the sink to find a dripper and filters, Liu muttered as he surveyed the chaotic interior, which looked as if it had been bombed.
A considerable amount of time had passed since Yeehyeon had left this house and was no longer able to help with the chores, but in the nearly two years since, Director Han had yet to find a housekeeper she liked. As Phantom was currently under construction, she was doing the housework herself, but she would have to find a new helper soon.
“I guess she just shoves things in wherever, as long as they’re out of sight. I’m thinking of just moving to a bigger place.”
He knew her habits well—she had no talent for tidying up, yet she became on edge if her surroundings weren’t neat. Fortunately, he had met a good person through an introduction from a Phantom client and had maintained a long-term relationship with them, but he was also well aware that finding someone to entrust with one’s household was not a simple matter of employment that could be solved with money alone.
A good personality didn’t guarantee a long-term arrangement either. In the end, the search for someone to manage a household was similar to dating, in that the focus was on how well that person fit with you.
After a cursory scan of the upper cabinets, Liu, who had begun opening the lower ones in succession, straightened up and looked back at her at her words about a bigger house being the ultimate solution.
“I heard there are professional services that come to your house to organize and store things.”
“Where on earth do you hear about things like that?”
Director Han threw her head back and laughed as she polished off the last bite of her sandwich.
Whatever she might think, Liu was also a resident of Korea, constantly exposed to the flood of miscellaneous information, both high- and low-quality, that appeared the moment he swiped his smartphone’s lock screen. He used to use his phone on the level of an old PDA, but these days, he found himself holding it much more often.
Recalling Yeehyeon’s studio of just over ten square meters—where, despite the lack of storage space, books and art supplies were neatly stacked along the walls, and even the socks and underwear in the drawers were immaculately arranged—Liu rubbed the ring on his ring finger with his left thumb and bent down again.
Discovering the dripper abandoned in a large salad bowl along with a trivet, a small steamer, and Christmas tree ornaments, Liu picked up one of the rescued ornaments by its tip and dangled it.
“Why is this in a kitchen cabinet?”
“Ah… Just put it back.”
At Director Han’s request, who collapsed onto the table with a troubled expression, Liu put the candy cane-shaped ornament back in its place (?) and, about ten minutes after getting up from the table, began to make coffee.
As he took his time pouring water over the coffee grounds in the filter in slow, circular motions, the aroma of coffee spread to every corner of the space. Unlike in the past, when he had felt repulsed by most scents, including perfume, due to his aversion to pheromones, he had recently become able to enjoy them little by little.
It had started with Yeehyeon’s pheromones and his scent, but if Yeehyeon hadn’t accepted him, the leisure of finding solace in the aroma of coffee would have been impossible. No, it wasn’t just a matter of coffee aroma.
He probably would have come to deny himself as an Alpha and a Ghost even more strongly than before. Almost to the point of self-hatred. He might have even tried to escape the influence of pheromones by overdosing on suppressants against all warnings, even if it meant destroying his sense of smell. Without his forgiveness, the person he was now, and the hope for the future he now held, could not exist.
In the past, he could never have imagined a life where he could become more accepting of himself through someone else embracing his faults and his very being. He had considered it a dependent act, leaving the judgment of his own worth in another’s hands.
But now, Liu could no longer condemn lovers who strove to have their affection affirmed by their partners. On the contrary, he empathized with their feelings more than anyone.
Returning to the table with two cups of coffee, Liu handed one to Director Han across from him.
Come to think of it, the place where he had first deliberately released his pheromones at Yeehyeon was right in front of this dining table. Back then, he himself had been sitting where Director Han was now, and Yeehyeon had been sitting where he was now.
The corners of his mouth tingled as he recalled the Yeehyeon of that time, not long after they had met. To hide the smile that was uncontrollably breaking through, Liu brought the mug to his lips.
He had not been generous in letting new people into his daily life and his world. Perhaps because people who treated others as a means to an end, or who were two-faced, had appeared not infrequently around both himself and his parents, it took him a long time to trust people. He had thought it was more efficient, both emotionally and time-wise, to set standards from the beginning and accept only those who met them, rather than starting with unconditional trust and going through the process of filtering people out through repeated disappointments.
He had tried to treat Yeehyeon with that hardened inertia, but it wasn’t long before he had to admit that he was a harmless being.
The way he seemed to treat all stimuli around him with caution, while simultaneously being unable to hide his curiosity, was different from other people with reserved personalities. He wasn’t a bold or sociable person, but he wasn’t closed off either. His taciturn lips, which never complained, made one’s eyes search for him, wondering if he was silently overexerting himself somewhere again.
It’s not hard to make a good first impression. Most people can skillfully hide their flaws up to a certain point. He had tried to stop himself from accepting Yeehyeon at such a rare, rapid pace, but to no avail.
He had felt almost anxious, wondering if a romantic incident would arise between him and Choi Inwoo. At the time, he had no intention of admitting it, of course, nor did he even try to understand why.
A deflating, hollow laugh escaped him at the memory of himself, sitting right in this spot, prattling on to Yeehyeon about Choi Inwoo’s frivolity and danger in relationships, pretending it was leisurely advice tossed out because he felt a little uneasy just watching. It was a good thing that the Yeehyeon of that time was so dense about romance that he didn’t recognize it as a man’s ugly possessiveness.
“Here.”
“……”
Liu’s reminiscence was interrupted as Director Han passed a file across the table.
“It’s the report Kwon Juhan submitted.”
“Why is he writing so many unsolicited reports these days?”
Liu took the file, opened it, and chuckled.
“It’s the audience age distribution for the first half of last year for the top ten major art museums and galleries in the country. If you flip the page, there’s also a graph showing the change in age demographics over the last five years.”
The report also included figures that Juhan had personally collected using his connections at several galleries around Phantom for which official data had not been released. The graphs, organized to show the changes at a glance, all indicated that people in their twenties were emerging as the new primary visitors to exhibitions. While art enthusiasts in their forties and older still had the purchasing power, for a mid-sized gallery of some scale like Phantom, the income from exhibitions could not be ignored, in addition to the profits from art sales.
This was something Liu and Director Han had felt firsthand while touring six or seven small galleries all morning to discover new artists.
Holding an exhibition at a particular gallery did not mean an artist was exclusively affiliated with it. Especially in recent years, there was a growing trend, centered on young artists, of prioritizing creative freedom without being tied to a gallery that maintained an exclusive contract system. Raising their value by gaining recognition in the traditional, authoritative art world was outside their interest.
Experimental art collectives were not only pursuing diverse cross-genre collaborations but were also expanding their territory by producing small quantities of posters, postcards, notebooks, bags, phone cases, and clothing using artists’ works. To the younger generation that consumed such products, art was not something to be owned and displayed for appreciation, but rather an accessory to express their own tastes and individuality, and choosing and attending exhibitions that matched their interests was an extension of spending their leisure time in a way that was ‘true to themselves.’ This was not a phenomenon unique to Korea, but an unavoidable global trend.
The fact that art was shedding its existing image as a ‘refined hobby for the few,’ much like classical music, and seeping into the public’s lives in more diverse forms was in itself a welcome development. But at this point, it was necessary for each gallery to consider and re-examine its own identity.
At the time of its opening, Phantom had been treated as a heretic with an unconventional management philosophy, but now, Phantom existed on the border between the established industry that adhered to traditional art museums and the world of experimental projects.
Neither here nor there, a vague identity that didn’t fully belong to either side. Unable to deny that Phantom was a perfect reflection of his own life, Liu gave a bitter smile and swallowed his coffee.
The report clearly revealed Juhan’s ambition to change Phantom in a more flexible direction. In the report, Juhan was clearly stating where he wanted to go.
“If I’d known Kwon Juhan would get his act together like this, I would have sent Yuni abroad long ago.”
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