The Borrowed Pencil

I spend my days drawing where the camera stands for a boy band, and my nights drawing a love story under another name, for one reader I've never met.

The Hanbit building used to make shoes. You can still tell. The brick is the color of an old saddle, the windows on the third floor are tall factory windows with iron frames, and somebody has bolted a glass box onto the side of it all so it looks like a warehouse wearing a new watch.

I'm Jin Na-rae, I'm thirty, and I board music videos for a living. For the next six weeks I'm supposed to do it from in here.

A girl from the production office meets me at the side door at nine. She has a lanyard for me and a coffee from the café on the ground floor, which is open to the public and full of girls in pressed school-uniform-style blazers who are not drinking their lattes so much as guarding them. My eyes go up before I can stop them. Two black CCTV domes over the lobby. One over the lift. A man at the café counter filming his cup for no reason.

"They're not here," the office girl says, kindly. "They never come through the front."

"I wasn't looking for anybody."

"Everybody looks."

The creative room is on the third floor, at the end of a corridor of offices with their doors open and their phones ringing. It's long and bright, with a concrete floor somebody has polished and a wall of corkboard that runs the whole length of it. My desk is the one under the last window. The light comes in from the left, which is the correct side for a right-handed person. I decide not to read anything into it.

I put the tablet down, and the paper boards, and my pencil case, and I twist my hair up into the tortoiseshell clip. That's the first thing I do at any new desk. It means I'm working.

The corkboard is empty. Eight years of this job and an empty wall still makes my stomach drop a little, the way an empty page does. Everybody thinks a storyboard is drawing. It's mostly deciding where the camera stands.

"You're the boards."

The man in the doorway is big, and he's wearing a padded navy vest over a shirt that has been ironed by somebody who loves him. He has the face of a person who hasn't slept properly since about 2017. He comes in, unwraps a stick of gum, and looks at my empty wall like he's read a lot of empty walls.

"Jin Na-rae," I say, and stand. "From Director Yeom's company."

"Oh Dong-sik. I manage the boys." He doesn't offer to shake hands. He jerks his head at the door. "Come. I'll show you the only useful thing on this floor."

The useful thing is a stairwell. It's behind a fire door at the far end of the corridor, plain concrete steps, a metal rail painted green, a window on the landing that looks out over the roofs toward Seoul Forest. It smells like dust and somebody's instant coffee.

He points at the ceiling. There's nothing there.

"No camera," he says. "Only place in the building. People come here to cry, or to tell somebody what they really think of a schedule." He leans on the rail and chews. "Anything you say on these stairs, you didn't say. That's the rule. I made it up, but it's held for a long time."

"What if somebody breaks it?"

"Then I find out who." He says it mildly, with the gum still going. "You'll need it. Six weeks in this building, everybody needs it once."

"I'm only here for the video."

"So was everybody." He pushes off the rail. "Director Yeom's in the small meeting room. She wants you at ten."

At ten I go down to the small meeting room. Director Yeom Ji-hye is forty-one and has worn the same down vest to every meeting I've ever had with her. She has a short black bob, rimless glasses, and a habit of drawing on whatever's in front of her, which today is the back of the treatment.

"Three nights," she says. "Ttukseom. The location permit ends at five in the morning, so we light fast and we don't argue on the riverbank. Six members, six night walks, one take each. No cuts inside a walk." She draws a line across the paper. "The camera leads. Each of them walks straight down the path toward us, the bridge lights behind, the city behind, and he looks into the lens and he's walking to you. To the fan. That's the whole video."

"Okay," I say.

She looks at me over the glasses. "You hate it."

"I don't hate it."

"You said okay like you were signing for a parcel you didn't order."

I pull the treatment toward me and turn it over to her side. I draw a path, a rail, the river. Then I put a small box beside the walker, a little behind his shoulder.

"Nobody walks toward a camera at night," I say. "Not alone. Walking toward a lens is a performance. They'll do it beautifully, because it's their job. But what you'll get is six beautiful performances." I tap the box. "If the camera walks with him, a little behind, we see what he's looking at. The river. The lights. Whatever he's thinking about. Then at the end, once, he turns. If he turns, it's earned."

She's quiet for a while. She takes her glasses off and polishes them on the vest, which only makes them worse.

"The label wants eyes to lens," she says. "Fans want to be looked at."

"Fans want to be looked at by somebody who was thinking about something else first."

She puts the glasses back on. "Board both. Mine first. River sequence on the wall by next Monday, all six walks."

"A week."

"A week." She stands. "And Na-rae-ssi. Board yours properly. If it's better, I'll steal it and say it was mine."

That's as close as Director Yeom gets to agreeing with anybody, so I go back upstairs feeling fine.

By four o'clock the wall has twenty-two thumbnails pinned to it, rough ones, two inches high, graphite on cheap paper. Each member gets a strip. I've drawn them from the concept photos the agency sent over, so they're everybody's faces from six weeks ago at best: Dohyun with his chin up, Eunchan with his hands in his pockets, Taerim halfway into a step like he can't help it.

The fourth strip is Ha-ram's. He's the quiet one. I know that the way everybody knows it, from variety clips where he laughs behind his hand while the others do the talking, from interviews where he says one sentence and the maknae takes the rest. In my strip he walks along the rail, and in the last frame he stops under the bridge and tips his head up and a little to one side, toward the light, like he's listening for something over the traffic.

I'm sharpening a pencil over the bin when the door opens without a knock.

Six men come in, and the room gets smaller. They come in a loose bunch, all of them in black, all of them in caps, the road manager behind them with his car keys in his hand and a look on his face that says ten minutes. Manager Oh is somewhere at the back, chewing.

"Just a look," somebody says. "Director Yeom said the walls were up."

They're not up. They're thumbnails. I put the pencil down and stand there like a person caught in her pajamas.

I watch them find their faces. Phones: the road manager's, in his hand, screen dark. The window behind me, but it faces brick. My eye counts these things before I've decided to, the way you check the stove on your way out.

They're good at this. That's the first thing. Even here, tired, between whatever they've come from and whatever they're going to, they arrive in a room the way they'd arrive on a set. Siwoo, the youngest, finds his strip first and makes a noise like he's been shot. "Noona, why do I look like I've been crying? I'm in the middle of a beautiful night."

"You're thinking," I say.

"I don't do that on camera." He grins at the others. "It's in my contract."

Dohyun, the leader, laughs, and asks me what lens. June, who is the one on bus shelters, studies his strip with the detachment of a man looking at a stranger who happens to be handsome. Taerim counts something under his breath and moves his feet, very slightly, against the frames. They're nice to me. They're nice to me the way they'd be nice to a fan at a signing: warm, quick, a smile in the right place and gone again. I've boarded enough men like this to know that face. It's a good face. It's made for a lens.

Then there's the one who isn't wearing it.

Ha-ram has stopped at the end of the wall in front of his own strip, and he's the only one who hasn't said anything. He's taller than I thought from the clips. Long coat, black cap pulled low, mask hooked under his chin, a curl of hair the color of dark cherries showing at the edge of the cap.

He looks at the last frame for a long time. Under the cap, his head tilts up and a little to the left, exactly where I put it. There's a small mole under his left eye that the concept photos had covered and I'd drawn in anyway, from a clip, without thinking. The fluorescent light catches the line of his jaw, and the graphite one beside it on the paper has the same angle, and for a second neither of them moves.

"Hyung," Siwoo says. "Van."

Ha-ram straightens. The public face comes down over him like a shutter, and it's a good one, a little shy, eyes crinkling, a slight bow to me as the others go.

"Thank you for your hard work," he says, politely, every word of it finished the careful way, like I'm a senior staff writer and not a freelancer in a borrowed chair.

"It's only thumbnails," I say.

"I know." He glances back at the wall. "Still."

At the door, the corner of my last thumbnail comes loose where the pin has slipped, and the paper curls down off the cork. He reaches back without looking, takes the pin out, smooths the corner flat with two fingers, and pushes the pin in again, straighter than I had it. Then the road manager says his name and he's gone.

The room is very quiet. I stand there with a pencil I don't remember picking up.

"That's the only thing anybody will remember about today," Manager Oh says from the doorway. I didn't know he'd stayed. "That they came up to see. Don't let it go to your head."

"It won't."

"Good." He looks at the wall, at Ha-ram's strip, and then at me, for one second longer than he needs to. "Ten o'clock in that stairwell, people say things they don't mean. Nine a.m. at a desk, they mean all of it." He knocks once on the doorframe. "Go home on time once this week."

I don't.

I leave at ten. In the stairwell I take the clip out of my hair, and that's me clocked off.

My apartment is a single room on the fourth floor of a villa block in Yeonnam-dong, with no lift and a landlady who leaves persimmons on the steps. From the window over my drawing desk I can see a strip of the Gyeongui Line Forest Park, the long path where the old railway used to be, couples walking on it under the streetlights at eleven at night like nobody's told them it's Monday.

I eat a triangle kimbap standing up. I take off the sweater, a fine charcoal knit I wore to look like a person who knows what she's doing, and pull on a loose gray cardigan that slides off one shoulder. Then I sit down at the other desk, the one nobody at Hanbit knows about, and turn on the tablet, and open the file that says Two Stops After Midnight, Ep. 54.

I've drawn it for a year under the name Halfmoon. A girl called Dan-bi who works the night shift at a bakery, and a man called Gyeol who rides the night bus two stops past his own, every night, so he can see her to her door. It pays the rent in the slow months. Nobody I work with has read it. If anybody I work with read it, I would move to Daejeon and live in my mother's spare room.

Before I start this week's episode, I go back to last Friday's. I always do. I scroll down past the hearts and the stickers and the girl who comments GYEOL MARRY ME on every single episode, down to the one note I'm actually looking for.

It's from lastbus. It always is. He has left one note on every episode for a year, since some night last autumn when the first one appeared under episode six, and they're never long and they're never about the kiss everybody's waiting for.

lastbus: Panel 40. She leaves the light on over the bakery counter after she's locked up, so he can see where she is from the stop. You didn't make him notice it. You let us notice it. Thank you for that.

Panel forty is the smallest panel in the episode. It's a light switch. I spent an hour on it at three in the morning, and I thought nobody would ever look at it.

I read it again. Then I open episode fifty-four, pick up the stylus, and start with the bus stop, from behind his shoulder, so you can see what he's looking at.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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