6Ep.. The Rules

Three in the morning. Half of Hari's diary was filled with Siu's handwriting. “You write this part,” she said, pushing the pen at him. “They're your memories. If I write them for you… later you might not recognize your own hand.”

He wanted to ask what she meant, but he didn't. He simply took the pen. Words written on paper, it seemed, would not disappear.

Let's sort it out. Not everything you draw becomes real, right? You said yesterday's didn't work.

…A stack of cash. I drew a whole sheet of it. Probably the best thing I've ever drawn. And nothing happened. The wanting alone isn't enough. The alley was different. That wasn't greed.

Only what's finished in earnest becomes real. Greed doesn't count.

But it takes as much in return. Memory. One cup of coffee blurred a whole day; the morning after I saved the grandmother—I couldn't remember where I grew up, couldn't call up one friend's face. Save something big, and it takes something big.

Hari's pen stopped. She looked at him for a moment, then flipped the diary back toward the front. Her hand halted on a date from a few days earlier.

One cup of coffee didn't cost you a day. It cost you a person. The last person you'd spoken to. The name, the voice, even the fact that the call had happened. You told me so that day, and I wrote it down here.

Then what about the alley? It replaced the whole world outside your window. And the price was—one kitchen from your childhood. The one where your mother made ramen on rainy days.

Siu could find nothing to say back. The scale was upside down. The drawing that had swapped out an entire world had taken one corner of his childhood; a single cup of cold coffee had taken a person.

It isn't about size. Whether the drawing is big or small has nothing to do with it.

Hari tapped the paper twice with the tip of the pen. Like someone checking her own words against themselves.

The price is set by where you drew the feeling from. Draw it from something shallow, and it takes something shallow. Draw it from a person—and it takes that person.

Siu thought back to the night he drew the alley. A place he had never been, and yet he had missed it. Now he thought he knew where that longing had come from. A fogged window. A kitchen on a rainy day. A place that gave him nothing now, no matter how he groped for it.

So—never draw while you're thinking of someone. Never.

The room went quiet. Siu's throat was dry.

There's one more. Each time I draw, that person comes nearer. First at the end of the alley—yesterday, right in front of my building. One step at a time, as if counting.

And if you don't stop, one day—right up to this window.

Then there's only one answer. Don't draw. Ever. The webtoon? Drop it. Pretend your right hand's broken for a while.

Siu could not answer. Because he couldn't think of anything he knew how to do besides draw. He was a man whose only refuge had been drawing. And now that one refuge was eating him, a bite at a time.

…All right. I won't draw. I'll quit.

That day Siu shut off the tablet. He watched the screen die to black, all the way. He put the pen in the deepest part of a drawer and forced the stubborn drawer shut. For the first time, a night without drawing came.

Through a gap in the curtain, he glanced outside. Beneath the streetlight, that person—for that one night—did not come a single step closer. Siu slept deeply, for the first time in ages.

It wasn't Hari's voice that woke him in the morning. It was the absence of any sound at all. She was standing at the desk with the diary open, and without a word she turned the page toward him. The pages he had filled in his own hand all night—were blank. Only the ruled lines remained; where the words had been, the paper was smooth. As if nothing had ever been written there at all.

Anything that comes from your hand… disappears. Your afterword did too. Drawings, writing—anything from your hand belongs to that place.

Hari took the pen back out of his hand. Her hand was shaking. The hand of someone who could not bear things vanishing.

From now on I'll do the writing. What comes from my hand stays.

It was also everything the two of them had seen so far. Every erased thing had come from Siu's hand; nothing Hari had written had ever lost a line. The observation was accurate. Why it was accurate, neither of them knew.

Hari turned past the blanked pages and wrote it all again from the beginning, on a fresh sheet, in a careful, even hand. The rules—four of them now—stood on the paper once more. Written out, they were even more frightening.

There were four rules now, and the pen was in Hari's hand. Things might turn out all right this way, Siu believed. …Until, three days later, an email arrived.