Chapter 1: Not another summer!

[Sunny and his not-so-little dog]

"Ahh...not another summer! Another summer...of studying!" 

Sunny grumbles, as he pitches small stones towards the shimmering water's edge. The stones bounce off the surface energetically, flinging liquid light into the air. 

It is the first weekend after the close of the spring school term, but he can't relax for even a moment. Sunny has known for a while that his grades would not afford him the kind of lazy, picturesque, beach-bound summer he dreamed of. Instead, he would have to take a full slate of summer courses to pull up his underwater GPA. 

"2.9 is way harsh...why couldn't I get extra credit for raising you well, Soeun?" He pouts towards his dog, a rambunctious Airedale terrier that had already started to make tracks around him, eager to learn this perplexing new game.

"I mean, I'm learning to be a vet tech, right? I feed you, dress you...trim your paws all nice...in eight years you've never even had indigestion, shouldn't that be worth something?"

"I even got you through high school!" He proclaims loudly, then lets out a quiet chuckle. 

"That last one's a joke." He looks at his four-legged pal and smiles knowingly. "You probably earned my high school diploma more than I did. At least, you were awake during my classes!"

He gives Soeun a lively pat on the back. Presses his face to the dense silvery fur, and breathes. "But we're not in high school anymore, are we, Toto..."

[Lost, but never found]

The transition from a small rural high school to one of the leading research universities in the country was an eye-opening one for Sunny. 

Gone were the days when he could keep long bleached hair, dress in baggy hand-me-downs, and bring his massive canine companion to class without so much as an upward glance from the instructor. 

No one ever misunderstood Sunny's character back then, or doubted his abilities. Everyone knew him, knew his family - knew his temperament as a baby, which professional baseball team he wanted to play for, which doting auntie he wanted to propose marriage to, his favourite side dishes. Affection, constancy and protection were the tone and tenor of his first 18 years of life.

Maybe, because it was so small and cloistered, it felt like his entire village shared one heart. He was probably a little naive, to believe that the rest of the world could be the same way...

Now going into his third year of living and studying at Busan Coastal University, he is still observing, and absorbing, the differences. And there are many. 

Sure, there are the things that any greenhorn undergraduate student would be wise to apprehend, and quickly: the best watering holes, the best hours to hit the gym circuit, how to power through your 30th consecutive hour of cramming without rupturing an artery. 

But then, there is another, more clandestine difference. The one that separates a small-town dreamer, who got in on a veterinarian's commendation and a scholarship from the local farming cooperative, from the well-heeled, clear-eyed Busan natives who have been guarding their destinies their whole lives. And Sunny isn't sure there is anything he can do or say to breach that gap. 

From the moment he stood up in front of a room of inebriated red-faced juniors during orientation week, to try to explain who he was and what he hoped to do with his life in less than 30 seconds, he could feel his knees throbbing and his insides swimming. Swimming - a sensation never felt in 18 years! Followed by an intense, inexplicable feeling of missing his brother. And now, two years on, the swimming sensation is more like a sinking one. 

[The letter]

When Sunny arrives home that day from his outing at the beach, after entering his lock combination incorrectly twice, he finds a thin and angry-looking letter shoved beneath his door. 

After taking far too long to wipe down Soeun's paws and then, to decide where best to rest his bike helmet among the piles of unwashed laundry and empty takeout containers, he finally picks up the letter. Turns it between his thumb and forefinger, like the delicate leaves of a pinwheel on a knowing wind.

From the alarming lightness of the envelope and the starch-white businesslike exterior, he feels almost sure of what it is. Something in it evokes the thin, pressed voice at the other end of the phone line that berated him when he tried to argue his latest overdue rent payment. A building management which kept no appointments, and which none of the tenants had ever seen. But as a newcomer to the city, nothing was all he could expect.

He opens the letter and stares at it for a while, moving his eyes across the printed paragraph multiple times, feeling sick on the inside. 

Crouching at his feet, Soeun looks up at him with the mix of expectation and empathy that centuries of evolution must have perfected to move the troubled owner's heart. Sunny cannot help but put on a smile. 

"You know..." he directs his voice downwards, trying to sound decisive, even brave...but he allows the words to hang in the air a little too long, and they fail him. He flinches - his neck giving his head a little involuntary tug - and tries again. 

"Scratch that. You know, I think I might be some kind of genius? It's lucky for us that I've already enrolled in summer school! They just gave us the keys to the kingdom, my Girl."

He absently reaches for Soeun's leash again, his mind racing. "We're not going to be homeless. No way. We can find a hiding spot on campus while I sort this out..."

[On the road again]

There is something that Sunny is genuinely talented at, and that is raising his own spirits. Perhaps it is to be expected of a young man who has always been sidelined by his family, and whose best friend cannot offer verbal encouragement. The more bad luck befalls him, the more heightened his "sunny" disposition becomes. 

Now having lost both his summer plans and his rental apartment, his powers of supernatural optimism may be at their zenith!

First things first. He knows that making do on campus would first mean finding a secondary storage location for his boogie board, his vintage wardrobe, his sneaker collection, and dozens of volumes of sports tournament manga. In other words, all of his worldly wealth. So Sunny piles everything into a couple of large milk crates attached to his bike, puts the rest in an overstuffed satchel on his back, and slowly makes his way up the winding seaside path to Hwang Hyuntae's house. 

"And who knows...maybe with my stuff sitting there...he'll bend a little about never taking on a tenant...we can talk about it...over a meal!" Sunny huffs and puffs vigorously, as he pulls his wagon along the steep slope, which is starting to be dabbed by light rain. "I can be pretty convincing...if you add my food to the mix!"

"Arf!" Soeun responds as she runs alongside the bike, looking like the word's most supportive flying mop. 

[A friend in need]

Hyuntae was Sunny's upperclassman at Busan Coastal until last year, when he finally earned his wings: he had belatedly wrapped up his PhD dissertation on the relationship between societal upheaval and belief in extraterrestrials, after failing to produce convincing results for two years in a row. (Also, after nearly getting into a fistfight with a rival candidate who he swears up and down had copied his thesis.) Hyuntae's relief at being done with school forever was soon squashed by the twin bugbears of unemployment and underemployment, and now he is steadfastly job hunting some 20 hours a day.

Sunny and Hyuntae had met two years ago in the most unexpected of ways: through their university's Greek Mythology Club. Although Hyuntae was a philosophy major, he was equally passionate about the morally complex, symbolically rich stories that nurtured the great minds of the Classical period, and acted as the club's treasurer. Sunny's interest was more prosaic: it was the twisted personal dramas of the Greek pantheon that attracted him like a bad tabloid: the beauty and the raw psychological terror of being romantically pursued by, hexed by, and the object of envy of literal gods. 

Just as Sunny is chased by creditors today, Hyuntae used to regularly track him down for overdue club fees. For some reason, the gray-eyed amateur sleuth always knew exactly where Sunny could be found on or around campus, once even waiting for him in the basement toilet of a local eatery. Through these tetchy encounters, a genuine friendship was born. (One that Sunny estimates he still owes 15,000 won, but a genuine one nonetheless.)

Sunny likes Hyuntae a lot - even if the guy can be a little goofy sometimes! Despite being his senior in school and life, Hyuntae never acts superior towards him or anyone else. He speaks freely, shares everything he knows no matter how trivial, and appears to be motivated entirely by the spirit of scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, by the same token, he is a gullible dupe who can never hang onto money. (See 15,000 won, above.)

It was a lucky thing that an elderly relative left Hyuntae a homestead, even if it was a very dilapidated and needy one. Formerly a country restaurant, its ample rooftop now affords plenty of room for growing vegetables, sheltering migrating songbirds lost in the city, and camping under the stars. 

Sunny likes the lived-in feel of Hyuntae's place, which appeals to him as a rustic, old-timey version of his own disorderly apartment, and therefore charming. His heart races with - yes, the exertion of the trip uphill, but also - the vain hope that Hyuntae could let him live there for the foreseeable future, instead of squatting ignominiously in the student centre. 

He may have to get a little clever, a little creative. But what's a close friendship without a little arm-wringing along the way? 

[The wind of destiny, the hill of fate]

The landscape, which until now was merely a frantic blur to Sunny, begins at last to stabilize as his pedalling slows down, becoming characteristic. Repeating patterns of off-grey boxes of apartments, storefronts, and business buildings become increasingly sparse, opening up in places to reveal the natural beachfront. There, the colours weave and warp, as the blue-green of the coastline dances along sharp blades of alabaster rock. 

The prospect of living next to the ocean loomed large in the list of factors deciding Sunny's choice of university. Far more than the quality of the vet tech program or the prospect of social integration, he cares deeply for the sea.  

Maybe reading too many comics as a teenager has something to do with this, but a part of Sunny secretly hungers for an itinerant life that could take him to all of the beaches of the world. He can see them all in his mind's eye when he dreams. The sharp marine scent, the limitless blue sky, the wind that seemed to drift in from all corners of the universe and buoy his floating body ever upwards as he wrestles with the cerulean waves. 

Beaches are fun, of course. But as he stood on the coast of Busan for the first time mere hours after his enrolment, he felt that it was so much more than that. With its infinite motion, its mysterious feeling of proximity to the astral bodies, and all of the poetry of its borders and frontiers, he felt an acute sense of touching the very source of life, and that sensation has never left his imagination. 

If there is any mystery or romance in life at all, it would surely be found at the beach. Maybe that's why he spends so much of his limited free time there, even though there is no soft white sand within the campus's immediate surroundings, and no youthful diversions to be found there. Spending lazy hours casting pebbles and dipping his feet, even when he should be studying, he perhaps hoped to be saved by the ocean in some way. 

As Sunny zips past these enticing glimpses of blue freedom, he suddenly notices something out of the corner of his eye. It appeared only momentarily, but was uncertain and uncanny enough to cause him to turn to it again, and once more as he walks his cargo to the safety of the other side of the pedestrian crossing. 

A human figure - not in the water but above it - hovering like a strong magnet. 

He claps the brake on his bike, and stands very still, looking out at the slim wedge of sea that reaches out to him. 

[A floating figure]

Just as he thought, it is a person - a floating figure clad in what looks from a distance like white pyjamas. A cold, pale form, untouched by the dapples of sunshine in the trees and on the banks.

From where Sunny is standing atop the hill, he surmises that it could be a young person, with dark hair and very pale skin. The body emits such a glow that he cannot make out any other detail, no telling curvatures of the body or even a face. 

The moon in daytime, he suddenly thinks. That's what this reminds him of. 

And then, a second later: a god. 

The phenomenon is so mysterious, and yet so patently plain, that Sunny simply stares at it for a long time without movement, as its edges billow and fray in the wind and the millet spray of rain. He knows he should probably take out his phone and document this strange apparition, but every sense prohibits it. Is he afraid of its beauty? Its capacity for vengeance?

The figure stays suspended in the air for a few seconds more as Sunny looks on in bewilderment. Strangely, there is no one else around - no passerby seen or heard - not even the roving wing of a gull - the silent universe inexplicably closing in around him and this mirage, in defiance of space and time. 

It suddenly occurs to Sunny that the figure may even be doing the same thing: staring back at him. 

He flinches, the sinew of his neck pulling involuntarily once again. Then suddenly and without warning, the figure disappears - leaving no afterimage at all - only the murky blue of the morning sky dissolving into sea, and the subtle aroma of the pelting rain.