“You know Maria, don’t you?”
Seeing Michael’s silence, Hunter seemed more convinced and asked again.
When Michael finally nodded, the hand wiping his dry face began to tremble slightly.
Come to think of it, since childhood, Maria would occasionally call him Michael, and each time he felt a strange sensation as if she were speaking to someone else.
Ha.
His lips, visible beyond his rough hand, twisted oddly, looking as if he were both smiling and crying.
* * *
That night, Michael fell asleep watching the child across from him gnawing at the iron bars as if trying to eat through them.
“What is the most perfect death?”
As she always did, she spoke to Michael while acknowledging his presence.
“It would be completely disappearing from existence in this world.”
“Like turning off a power switch. Completely escaping from the flow of time—past, present, future.” Though he spoke flatly, he was concerned about Maria’s lack of response and carefully closed his laptop. She was just quietly smiling.
“Why are you smiling?”
“Because I like what you said.”
Feeling an inexplicable sense of déjà vu, he reached out toward her face, and her soft cheek pressed against his palm.
“So what do you think is the perfect death?”
“No longer dreaming.”
Her answer came without a moment’s hesitation. No longer dreaming? Hunter thought about it carefully before shrugging his shoulders.
“Well, I suppose this is a relative concept that can’t be defined in a single way. The perfect death for me is different.”
“What is it for you?”
Hunter kissed Maria gently on the forehead and smiled broadly.
“To meet death in exactly the same way as you.”
“Just imagining it makes me satisfied.” As he murmured, chewing over the thought, the corners of her eyes, curved like half-moons, gradually darkened.
There was a sense of emptiness in the way she secretly swallowed while maintaining a gentle smile. She frowned as if about to cry at any moment, but ironically, her eyes remained bone dry.
“Maria?”
Just as the space between her lips, resembling red fruit, was about to open, Michael woke from the dream.
When he opened his eyes, he was in an unfamiliar mansion. There was no mold-covered ceiling and walls, no children’s cries echoing in his head. Still intoxicated by the vivid smile lingering in his mind, he wandered aimlessly through the mansion until he saw Hunter’s back through an open doorway.
A scent so sweet it made his tongue tingle wafted from the cup in Hunter’s hand. Michael rubbed his eyes and murmured as if sleep-talking.
“Copycat.”
“You actually hate sweet things.” Once, after watching Maria drink cocoa, Hunter had forced himself to wet his tongue with it, and since then had consistently carried it around. Of course, he had never once emptied the cup.
He tried to imitate everything Maria did. If she tore the wings of a butterfly sitting on the bushes, he would tear them too; if she lay down in the garden on a rainy day, he would lie down beside her.
Even on days when Maria had the slightest physical ailment, he would harm himself to create wounds identical in shape and location to hers.
A man who wanted to become identical to Maria by imitating everything about her. That was Hunter.
“She sometimes called me Michael.”
Hunter put down the mug and slowly approached Michael.
“It was definitely a different attitude than when she dealt with me. It made me feel jealous, but she seemed even more delighted. Naturally, I became curious about this person called Michael.”
“I wondered if he really existed.” The emotions in his gaze were too mixed and uncontrolled to be looking at a child.
“You must have the same ability as her.”
The mere fact that Michael actually existed seemed to make him uncomfortable. How could he welcome an uninvited guest who suddenly appeared in what he believed was an exclusive relationship between himself and Maria?
Despite his openly displayed malice, Hunter’s actions were relatively gentlemanly. He provided the mansion and placed Marsha by young Michael’s side as a kind of guardian.
Marsha’s face looked familiar, and pondering it, Michael suddenly recalled a dream he had before.
A girl born to a prostitute who, at the age of twelve, had killed a man who made advances toward her and fled, but unfortunately caught the eye of a Gostin underling and couldn’t escape becoming caged.
At one time, Marsha’s only pleasure was sneaking into a shabby movie theater to secretly watch films. Since it was practically abandoned with almost no visitors, sneaking in wasn’t much of a challenge.
Even the owner seemed to have given up on properly running it, showing the same popular movie from last year all year round. Nevertheless, the girl visited consistently.
The movie’s title was “Marsha Lee,” unusually featuring an Asian woman as the protagonist. Being an art film, a young girl couldn’t possibly understand its complex psychology and profound meaning. She simply liked the song the protagonist hummed and habitually sang along.
Looking back, she had been fortunate. That song caught Hunter’s attention, allowing her to escape from the cage.
Perhaps knowing this, she later named herself “Marsha.” Without being forced, she swore eternal loyalty to Hunter like an honorable knight.
When Michael told this story to Herick later, he clicked his tongue, saying he couldn’t understand. But Michael understood perfectly. She had simply set a goal for her life. After all, nothing is more tedious than spending a long life without any purpose.
“This time, I tried making soufflé pancakes.”
Meanwhile, Hunter, who visited the mansion once or twice a week, seemed to have opened his heart, acting more affectionately than before. He brought or made sweet foods. The shape and taste were exactly the same as what he had made for Maria.
Because of this, Hunter’s kindness felt more pitiful than appreciated. While not wanting to constrain Maria, he still wanted to keep her in his embrace, and this was his way of channeling that desire.
One day, Hunter stroked Michael’s head as he stuffed his mouth full of macarons. When Michael reflexively knelt down, Hunter showed a startled expression for the first time.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Even in that brief moment as he sighed and lifted Michael up, Michael could read the sticky desire in Hunter’s dark eyes.
“Do you miss her?”
When the topic of Maria came up, Hunter’s face hardened as expected. Michael climbed onto Hunter’s lap and pressed his lips against Hunter’s, but Hunter didn’t avoid it.
It was amusing. While admiring her and deliberately packaging his own emotions as praise for a great artist, as soon as he was touched this way, his twisted true feelings were immediately revealed.
Michael was intriguingly looking into Hunter’s eyes, which were disgustingly gleaming, when he suddenly met the gaze of a boy through the window curtain.
Theodore Cooper.
The boy who had watched his biological father die until the end. As Theo backed away, Michael stared at him before eventually smiling. For reasons unknown, the flow of time that Michael had never felt in his life strongly resonated through this encounter with Theo.
My future self spoke to me. The story is just beginning.
