"Do you know your name?"
He looks at me like I've asked him something offensive. "Yes."
"What is it?"
"Cha Junho." He says it the way you say something that shouldn't need saying, with the particular patience of someone who has decided to be cooperative despite having every reason not to be. "Why are you asking me that?"
"I'm checking what you remember."
"Why?"
"Because it matters."
He watches me for a moment with the kind of attention that feels like it's looking for something specific, some tell, some reason to stop cooperating. I keep my face neutral and wait for him out.
"And you don't know me," I say. "You don't remember me at all."
"No. Am I supposed to?"
I open my mouth and "You made my life—" comes out before I can stop it and then I stop it and there's a half second where the sentence just hangs there unfinished between us and he raises an eyebrow and I move on.
"Do you remember your family?"
The suspicion doesn't leave his face but he answers.
His mother's name, his father's name, his younger brother Cha Minsu, seven years younger, who used to fold the corner of every page in every book he read and drove Junho insane for it. He says all of this with the flat affect of someone reciting information they're not sure why they're reciting, but he says it without hesitating, without searching, like the names are right where he left them.
I pull out the notebook and write them down.
"Why are you writing that?"
"Process of elimination." I flip to a clean margin. "Shin Boyoung. Do you know that name?"
He frowns. "She sat behind me in homeroom for two years. Why."
"Park Jungsoo."
"We played in the same football league in university. We weren't close." He pauses. "What are you doing?"
"Hwang Daesung."
"My neighbor. Had a dog that barked at everything. I don't know what you're—"
"Yeon Siah."
Nothing. He looks at me and I watch his face do the thing faces do when they're genuinely searching and coming up empty, that particular blankness that isn't blankness at all but the absence of something that should be there.
"Is that supposed to mean something to me," he says.
"That's my name."
"I know. You told me." He's watching me carefully now. "I don't know you. I've never met you. Is that a problem?"
I close the notebook. "Wait here."
I go through the panel into my bedroom and I close it behind me and I stand in the dark for a moment with my hand still flat on the wall.
He remembers everyone. His family, his neighbors, people he sat near in school, people he barely liked in university, a dog that belonged to someone he lived next to. He remembers all of it without effort and he does not remember me and I cannot figure out where in the methodology that is accounted for because I checked the methodology, I checked it repeatedly, I checked it the way I check everything which is more than once and from multiple angles and with the specific paranoia of someone who cannot afford to be wrong about this.
I go back through everything. The sequence, the materials, the preparation, the seven months of cross-referenced sourcing. Writing and speaking simultaneously. The hand against the platform. The nine reasons read in order, spoken aloud, no deviation.
All correct. Every step.
So it doesn't have to do with the ritual.
Which means it's him, or it's me, or it's something between us that I did not identify as a variable because I did not know it was one, and I don't know which of those is worse but I know that one of them has just made everything significantly more complicated and I have limited time to figure out which one before he starts asking questions I'm not ready to answer.
I give myself forty seconds. That's enough. That's what I have.
Then I go back in.
He's standing exactly where I left him, arms folded, watching the panel open like he's been tracking the seconds too.
"Are you going to tell me what's happening," he says.
"Eventually."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I have right now." I put the notebook back in my bag and look at him properly, the way I haven't let myself since he came out of his body, since his face did nothing I recognized and I had to file that somewhere fast and keep moving.
He looks exactly like he looked. Same face, same posture, same quality of attention that always felt like being assessed and found adequately interesting, not impressive, just interesting enough to bother with, which was somehow worse than being ignored.
He doesn't know that I know what that feels like. He doesn't know any of it.
"You don't know where you are," I say. "You don't know how you got here or who I am or why I'm asking you questions. That's all correct. I'll explain it but not tonight."
"Why not tonight."
"Because it's a longer conversation than tonight has room for and I need to think first."
He looks at me for a long moment. I can see him deciding something, running the same kind of calculation I run, arriving at an answer I can't read.
"Fine," he says. "But I want it on record that this is strange."
"Duely noted, sir."
"And that I don't trust you."
"Also appreciated."
He looks around the room one more time, the low platform, the shelf, the panel in the wall, and I watch him not ask the question he's clearly thinking about asking, which means he's decided he doesn't want the answer yet, which means he's smarter about what he can handle than most people are.
That, at least, is exactly what I planned for.