The Missed Count

I have spent ten years not watching one of the six men in Lodestar, and in this industry that takes effort.

CEO Han's office smells of vinegar and window cleaner, and her door is open, which I did not expect. At Tidemark you knock twice and wait for a secretary. Here I'm standing on carpet in my good white sneakers, and the head of a whole agency is waving me in with her phone.

"Ko Eun-sol. Sit. You want coffee? Don't have the coffee. Sit."

I sit. She doesn't. She's a small, trim woman in a gray blazer with her black hair cut neat at the jaw, and she walks while she talks, window to desk, desk to window, like the room is a stage she's blocking.

"Your CEO and I coached vocals together for six years," she says. "He was terrible at it. He's better at this. He's lending you to me for three weeks, and I'm paying for every hour, through him, properly. You'll be credited on the title track. It's in the agreement. Did they show you the agreement?"

"This morning."

"Good. Then you know more than my legal team, who are still reading it." She stops at the street window. The blinds are all the way up. Down there, a delivery scooter is parked on the sidewalk with its box open, and a girl in a beret is photographing a latte on the café's outside ledge. "Comeback is Tuesday the fourth. Album at six. Pre-record at dawn on the Thursday. The choreography is good. Nine-tenths of it is very good. The bridge doesn't land."

"Doesn't land how?"

"If I could say how, I wouldn't need you." She picks up a blue pen from the desk, uncaps it, caps it again. "Six men, and on the bridge they look like five men and a delay. My boys have watched it on the monitor a hundred times and they say it's fine. It isn't fine. You'll see it."

"Who made the bridge?"

"They did. Mostly the main dancer." She says it the way you'd say who brought the cake. "He's very good. They're all very good. They've been doing this for nine years and they are tired of hearing from me." She looks at me, finally, straight on. "They will not be tired of hearing from you. Not yet. Come on."

She doesn't call anyone to walk me down. She walks me down herself.

The elevator has a camera dome in the corner of its ceiling, a little black eye. I stand under it and look at the floor numbers and do what I always do in a building that isn't mine: exits, cameras, who's on the phone. One dome in the elevator. One over the doors when they open on B2. A man with a mop at the end of the corridor, earbuds in.

I know whose practice room this is. I've known since Tuesday, when Kwon Yu-jeong called me into her office and said "Hanbit" and then "Lodestar," and I said "Okay" in the same voice I use for a costume fitting. Their faces are on bus shelters. Their songs are in every convenience store from here to Busan. I've walked out of rooms where a monitor was playing them, and I've let every one of my dancers think it was because I needed the bathroom.

Six men in a room. I can watch six men in a room. I've done it for a living since I was twenty-one.

B2 is long and low and smells of floor polish and other people's effort. The mirror wall runs the whole far side, and it's clouded along the bottom, a gray band at shin height where a lot of breathing has happened. To the left of the speakers there's a dent in the wall at knee height with a yellow smiley-face sticker pressed into it. A staff camera stands on a tripod in the corner, its red light off. Six water bottles in a row by the door. A seventh, half-empty, rolled under the bench.

The music cuts. Everyone turns.

"This is Choreographer Ko," Han says. "From Tidemark. She's ours until the stage. Be nice to her or I'll hear about it."

The one nearest the door steps forward and bows properly, from the waist, a real bow, not the bob you give a delivery man. "Seo Do-hyun. Thank you for coming, Choreographer Ko. We know it's not your building."

"Thank you for having me," I say, and bow back. My Korean is fast in a studio. It always has been. It's the phone that undoes me, the bank and the immigration office and my landlord's son, but in a room with a mirror I don't think about it. "Please don't change anything for me. Run it the way you've been running it."

"From the top?"

"From the top."

Han stands by the door with her phone in her hand and doesn't leave. I take the far corner, by the camera, where I can see the mirror and the backs of them at the same time. I take my notebook out of my jacket pocket. My fingers touch the roll of glow tape in there, flat and cool, and I leave it where it is.

I don't look at faces. That's not a rule; it's a habit, and it's a good one. Faces lie. A dancer can smile through a count he's dropped and nobody in a stadium will know. Feet don't lie. Weight doesn't lie. You watch where the weight goes on the one and the five, and the rest of the body tells you everything a face would only perform.

Dohyun counts them in.

The title track is fast and bright and built on a brass hit that comes in every eight like a slap on the back. The verse is clean. The chorus is better than clean. Six men hitting the same angle at the same time makes a sound in your chest even without the music. I write chorus fine and draw a line under it.

Then the bridge.

The music thins out to a drum and a held synth note, and the formation splits, three and three, and pulls back into a V. The point of the V runs forward and goes up. It's a good jump. It's the kind of jump you put in a teaser. He goes up on the six and comes down on the seven, and the other five hit their accent on the eight, and the point of the V is still landing. Not much. A quarter of a count. Less. The kind of late you'd never see on a phone screen and can't stop seeing once you have.

Five men and a delay. Han was right.

"Again from the bridge," I say. "Please."

Dohyun nods. They reset. I watch the point of the V. I watch his feet and nothing else. Black sneakers, black track pants, good feet, fast feet, a dancer's feet with nine years on them. He goes up. He comes down. Something settles, after the landing, a small adjustment I can't name yet, and the count has already left without him.

"Again."

Again. Late.

"Again, please. Half speed."

At half speed it's almost on. Almost. I write point of V — 7 — late, all speeds and draw a box around it, and then a second box, which I only do when something's going to take more than a day.

"Water," I say. "Five minutes. Thank you."

The music stops. Six men breathe at once, and the mirror fogs a little higher. The youngest-looking one, with a face that's doing three expressions at the same time, goes straight for a bag of protein bars by the door. Somebody laughs at something somebody else said. Han's phone buzzes and she glances at it and puts it face down on the bench.

The point of the V walks to the mirror with his back to me.

He's drenched. His black sleeveless tee is stuck to his back between the shoulder blades, and his arms are the arms of a man who has done push-ups on a hard floor every morning for a decade. His neck is flushed red right up to the ears. He's wearing a black headband over hair that's been dyed for the comeback, warm gold, pushed straight back. He puts both hands flat on the bar in front of the mirror and leans on it and lets his head drop, and then he lifts it, and pulls the headband off.

The gold falls forward over his forehead. In the mirror, a small nick cuts through his left eyebrow, white in the flush. He tips his head and drags the back of one wrist across his mouth, the way he did it at nineteen. His eyes come up and find mine in the glass, and stop.

Gil Tae-rim.

I've watched forty seconds of him, total, in ten years. A clip on somebody's phone in a van. A billboard at Sinchon I walked under fast. The black hair he had then is gone, and the boy's face has turned into a man's face, longer through the jaw and tired under the eyes in a way the bus shelters airbrush out. He holds still in the mirror. So do I.

The protein bar wrapper crackles. Somebody says "Hyung, you want half?" and the room keeps going around us like a room does.

He turns from the mirror and looks at me directly, across the floor. Nothing on his face. Not a flicker. A professional face, pleasant and closed, the face of a man who's met a thousand staff members in a thousand rooms and is ready to meet one more.

So that's how we're doing it. Good. I can do that. I've been doing it for ten years from across the city.

I look down at my notebook. Point of V — 7 — late. I already knew who the point of the V was. I watched the chorus. I know the formations from the teaser stills Kwon sent me. I just didn't let myself put the feet and the name in the same sentence, the way you don't let yourself read the last page.

"Choreographer Ko," Dohyun says, coming over with a towel around his neck. He's polite, and he's also the leader, which means he's here to find out whether I'm any good. "What do you think?"

"I think the chorus is excellent," I say. "I think the bridge is where the song should go up and it doesn't. I'll have notes for everyone by the end of today."

"For everyone," Dohyun says. Not quite a question.

"For everyone."

He considers this, and nods, and goes back to his bottle.

There's a bottle at my feet. I didn't bring water down; I left it on CEO Han's desk with my coffee I wasn't allowed to drink. This one is cold from the fridge in the corner, beaded down the sides, and the cap has been cracked open and screwed loosely back on. Tae-rim is walking away from my corner toward the speakers, wiping his neck with a towel.

I drink half of it. The cold hits the back of my throat.

"Positions," I say. "From the bridge."

They run it for me eleven more times between three and six. I don't ask him to do anything different. I don't ask anyone to do anything different. On the fourth run I move the two outside men of the V back half a step so I can see the point better, and on the seventh I ask the youngest one, Siwoo, to stop doing a face on the held note, which he takes with real grief, and everyone laughs, and the room loosens. On the ninth I get down on the floor at the side, flat on my stomach, cheek near the boards, and watch the landing at the height of a shin. Six pairs of sneakers come down. Five land. One lands and then lands again.

That's the delay. Not the jump. After the jump. Something in the landing he doesn't trust.

I don't say it. I get up and dust off my leggings and write it down.

At some point Han leaves without saying goodbye, the way a person leaves who has seen enough to know she's paid for the right thing. At some point the mop man looks in through the door and goes away again. The light in B2 doesn't change, because there isn't any daylight down here, only the long white tubes over the mirror, so the only clock is the fog on the glass, climbing.

He speaks to me once in three and a half hours.

It's on the tenth run. I say, "The point of the V, please, one more time on its own," and he walks to the front of the floor, and before Dohyun counts him in he turns his head and says, politely, "From the six, Choreographer Ko, or from the top of the bridge?"

Like he's asking which door to use.

"From the six," I say. "Thank you, Tae-rim-ssi."

The -ssi sits on his name like a coat on the wrong hook. At the academy I never once called him anything polite. I called him you, mostly, and Busan, when he was being slow, and he called me noona with his mouth full of something, in the casual speech two people use when they've sweated on the same floor every day since spring. Now I give him every polite ending I've got. I give him the ones I'd give a bank manager.

He nods once and goes up on the six. He comes down late.

"Thank you," I say. "That's very helpful."

At half past six I clap my hands twice, and everyone stops and turns, and I give my first note.

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

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