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Seulgi didn’t know how long she had been working at the Imaginarium by the time she finally decided to use the photo booth. In order to know that, she would have had to know what she was doing before.
It all started with a customer. Seulgi’s days usually started and ended with a customer — if she could even define her day with a start and an end, as she didn’t know what she did when she wasn’t at the store. When she was conscious, she was at work, and for as long as she was at work, there were customers. They would slip inside to get away from rainy days or starry nights or strife. It didn’t matter what they were getting away from, because they usually all came because they wanted something, and the Imaginarium had something to give them. Besides, what happened outside the Imaginarium was none of her business.
It started with a customer, as things in Seulgi’s life usually did. But even to someone like her, to whom time was immaterial, this one was special.
🕹
Joohyun, despite her appearance, was a timid woman. This much Seulgi could tell, before they had exchanged a single word. Behind her pearls and black lace and sharp chin, there was a frailty to her stance. Her hand shivered as she slid a note over the counter.
“Five minutes with the photo booth, please,” she said. Her voice was so quiet, Seulgi almost didn’t hear her.
The payment was not enough. Money had no value in the Imaginarium, and its cyclical nature meant the note would find its way back to Joohyun eventually. Still, Seulgi kept quiet, like she always did in such a situation. The Imaginarium always had a way of making sure people paid their price, whether they knew it or not.
So Seulgi pretended to process Joohyun’s payment, opening the register and putting it through. She reached beneath the counter for an open box of shiny round tokens, metallic to touch, feather-light to hold. They came in many colours that only ever manifested when Seulgi picked them out of their box, with no apparent pattern to their madness. Joohyun’s token today was pink.
“Here.” Seulgi placed one token on the tray in front of her. “The photo booth is ready for you.” Her eyes wandered lower, to the small purse hanging from the crook of her arm. “Would you like to keep your bag with me?”
Joohyun shook her head, offered an even quieter “no thank you”, and turned around. She held her token to her chest between two fingers, as if it could easily break, and pulled the booth’s curtain aside just as gentle. Seulgi had seen the cold fluorescent from inside the booth so many times from her exact spot behind the counter, but somehow the speed at which Joohyun pulled the curtain closed made her feel like she was missing something. She averted her eyes as lights flashed behind the curtain, once, twice, then thrice.
There was a console sitting atop her counter with a screen right in the middle, thirteen inches. Through this screen, Seulgi saw everything. She saw the changes in fate that people tried to win in the claw machines, and she saw the fortunes they drew from the lucky dip. She saw their greatest desires when they stepped into the photo booth.
Joohyun looked different. Her hair was long and thick and covered in flowers, and her skin kissed by the sun as she lay on the cusp where the waves crashed onto the sand. Her face wasn’t fighting its way out of her head, and her head didn’t feel heavy on her shoulders, and her legs didn’t drag as they walked because she didn’t have anywhere to be. As each wave crashed down on her body, it washed a part of her away like it was sand, until there was nothing left but rue and abatina and butterfly weed.
Joohyun desired many, many things. But the only souvenir of her visit was a sheet of photos the length of two palms, only big enough to barely make out the details of each individual photo. Seulgi could see the previews. A happy Joohyun sitting up and staring right into the camera; a content Joohyun lying on the wet sand; an empty beach.
For some, this was enough. They took their photos from the booth, gave a brief nod to the counter, and then they were never seen again.
Seulgi had a feeling this was not the case with Joohyun.
🕹
Joohyun came back, just as Seulgi thought. Infrequently at first, and then over, and over, and over. She only ever used the photo booth, barely acknowledging the many other machines on the floor.
On the fifth time Joohyun paid patronage to the Imaginarium, Seulgi watched her kill her brother and father.
It wasn’t Joohyun’s real home, although Seulgi wouldn’t know what that looked like. If she had to imagine it, it would be a penthouse with glass walls and sharp angles and furniture that existed to create empty space rather than fill it. Joohyun’s room would be just like every other room in the house, although once upon a time she imagined it would have been full of posters and books and the toys of her childhood, and her walls may have been painted wonderful colours that someone else had to work twice as hard to maintain. Or perhaps it wasn’t so warm and lovely, but it was still full — full of of papers, full of planners, full of the things Joohyun had accumulated over her life. Perhaps she had a beautiful dresser — or perhaps an entire room in which to dress in — and from the side of a mirror or a stand had hung a twine necklace strung with beads and hard candy. That necklace sat in the Imaginarium’s back room today.
Seulgi wouldn’t know, because today, as Joohyun sat in the booth, she saw some place totally different. A dark, towering mansion with no details of note except that it appeared to reach into the stormy clouds circling around it. Its stained-glass windows were yellowing with age, and its wallpaper peeled off the corners. It was there that Joohyun witnessed the floorboards of the kitchen crack open, rise above the male members of her family and swallow them whole, and she knew that she was the one who had caused it.
Most of Joohyun’s desires were to feel nothing. In this one, she felt… good.
After ten minutes, the booth went dark. Joohyun stepped out, heel first, then head, then the rest of her body. She had stopped wearing black, but the rest of her wardrobe, it turned out, was nothing but whites and creams and beiges. Today it was business casual — smart pants, smarter top, and her hair tied into a neat ponytail near the top of her neck.
The past five times, Joohyun would collect her photos, send Seulgi a shy nod, and then rush out as if she wanted Seulgi to forget she had ever been there. As if Seulgi even could forget.
This time, Joohyun paused as she faced the counter. She looked to the console, tucked into the end, and asked, “You see everything, don’t you?”
Seulgi gripped the end of the shelf that sat out of sight below the counter top, next to where the box of tokens sat and a receipt printer that she hadn’t touched in years. “Yes.”
“I hope I don’t scare you.”
“It’s not my job to pass judgement.”
“But surely you pass judgement anyway? You don’t need to be paid to have an opinion.”
Seulgi frowned. She supposed a desire to commit murder should scare her, but it wasn’t like Joohyun had planned to murder her. And even through this brief glimpse, in the very first time she had ever met them, Joohyun’s father and brother didn’t seem like nice people.
“I’m only scared for you. I’m scared you’ll have to go back to them after all of this.”
Joohyun’s smile didn’t falter, but it did become strained. “I’ve handled them for every single day in my life,” she told Seulgi. “What’s another?”
🕹
One time, Seulgi watched Joohyun dream of nothingness.
Her desires often consisted of her slowly disappearing, leaving behind a beautiful expanse, such as a beach or a flowery meadow or a forest creek. Seulgi had seen her jump off cliffs and disintegrate into the mists of a waterfall, or dive into the ocean only to never come back up, or be carried away by a ship with sails made of cumulus clouds. It wasn’t death — Seulgi would intervene if it were death. It was simply ceasing to exist. Disappearing till she couldn’t be perceived, even by herself. Seulgi knew this because she had seen death in Joohyun’s desires, she had seen violence, and she knew that neither of those were things that Joohyun wanted for herself.
That is, except for this one time, where Joohyun was in a black expanse with no start and no end, and she had a corporeal form that walked on absolutely nothing as if it was solid ground. And there was another woman, barely older, looking only slightly different to Joohyun.
Joohyun talked with the woman for a long time, asking her this and that — was she well, was she happy, why did she leave so soon, et cetera, et cetera. Seulgi had heard conversations like this time and again, often and often. She had never known anyone that had left her in this way, nor had she left anyone (that she was aware of), but through seeing how everyone else felt, she understood anguish was the appropriate emotion. Joohyun, however, was a calmer kind of sad. The kind where she held her hands in a fist and dug her heels into the ground that did not exist.
“I wish you had never given birth to me,” Joohyun told her mother, quite simply, as if she was telling her about the weather, or that she was low on groceries. “Then I wouldn’t have to be here without you.”
Seulgi held her breath until Joohyun stumbled out with none of the stuff poise she usually carried, holding her hands close to her chest.
“Do you have somewhere private?” Joohyun asked.
Seulgi frowned. The photobooth, as far as she knew, was private enough. There was a curtain. But when she realised Joohyun meant somewhere out of the way, it came to her.
“There is the storage room,” Seulgi told her. “It’s messy.” Far too messy for a woman like Joohyun, who was always neat and never had a hair out of place.
Joohyun nodded. “That will do.”
The Imaginarium’s storage room was one that barely needed Seulgi’s attention. All the payment customers made ended up here, tucked away in paper boxes or obsidian safes or golden chests whose keys were nowhere to be found. Every surface of every shelf was covered in some object, and then that object was covered in something else. There was no system of organisation for the Imaginarium didn’t need it. Besides, if Seulgi needed anything from the shelves (she rarely did), she could always request it from the Cupboard With the Objects That Are Needed.
The Cupboard was for far more than just the items that customers sent as payment. Now, Seulgi requested a handkerchief from the Cupboard, which it had ready as soon as she opened it. It was made from the softest of silks, so much so that it slipped from her hands as she carried it over. Joohyun caught it before it could hit the ground, moving faster than Seulgi would have ever expected of her.
Seulgi averted her eyes as Joohyun started to blow her nose and dab her eyes. It was startling to hear human noises from the woman she’d come to see as much more than during her visits; but of course, there was so much Seulgi had yet to know about Joohyun.
See, it was easy to think, when you saw over and over again the deepest desires of people going through their darkest times, that you knew them. One time she’d seen a young girl walk in with hands hidden in her sleeves and tear streaks on her cheeks, and watched her play at the claw machine for two hours. There was an entire section of a shelf in the back room dedicated to that one girl on that one evening, who finally got what she was looking for when she had very little left to pay. As the girl clutched onto her plush deer, Seulgi saw her on the console not too long in the future, hair tucked away from her face, sleeves rolled up, and the plush deer was now a real one who she would confide everything to, good and bad, and the deer wanted nothing from her other than her company. Seulgi felt like she knew everything about her all at once. She was lonely. She was sad because she was lonely. She had previously been fated to be lonely, but now that the Imaginarium had changed her fate, she had a friend.
That girl came back many days later, without the deer. She stepped into the photo booth. A new fate, it seemed, just came with a new set of troubles.
Similarly, all Seulgi had seen of Joohyun was her dreams. Her fantasies that went beyond the bounds of what, she supposed, normal humans were capable of. Things that she did not understand, like ageing and sickness and change. Seulgi had never cried. Seulgi had never felt emotions so strong they had to physically purge themselves from her body.
“Thank you,” Joohyun finally said. Her voice sounded wet and dry at the same time. “I feel bad for making a mess of something so delicate.”
“It’s not mine,” Seulgi replied simply. She picked the edge of the handkerchief between two nails, and placed it in the first empty surface area she could find. This, she agreed, should be enough payment for the day. “Are you feeling better?”
“A little. Do you have a mirror?”
“Yes!” Seulgi went for the Cupboard once again, and this time it gave her simple handheld mirror, round and small enough to fit in one’s palm. “Will this do?”
“This will do just fine. Thank you.”
Joohyun stared at her reflection like it was a problem that needed solving. Her eyes narrowed and flit from corner to corner as she turned her head in various directions, not giving away whether she was any closer to solving the equation. With a final press of her lips, she held the mirror back out in both hands, right palm up.
“Thank you,” she repeated.
Seulgi nodded stiffly. “Is there anything else you need? Perhaps… something for your face?”
“Do I need something for my face?”
“No! No no no. That’s not what I meant.”
Joohyun laughed. Seulgi wondered how someone who, thus far, had been quiet as a mouse both in person and in her dreams, could laugh so loud and ugly.
She liked it.
“You’ve been very generous,” Joohyun said, “And I cannot ask more of you.” With one swipe down her torso, she smoothed away the wrinkles in her shirt that her slouch had caused. “And I’ve spent enough time here,” she added weakly.
“I’ve had customers spend hours here. You’d be surprised.”
“Still,” she whispered. “It is time for me to move on.”
🕹
Joohyun didn’t return for many days, and Seulgi began to wonder if she had stolen something from her.
There was an emptiness in her gut, a pang of something that couldn’t have been hunger, because Seulgi was never hungry. It was constant, so much so that she began not to notice it, until suddenly she would, and then she would think about Joohyun who must have caused it, and then she would feel a shortness of breath and a numbness of the hands. Her body had been rearranged — her stomach in her chest, her lungs in her skull and her limbs had switched places. Her heart, she feared, was nowhere to be found.
Perhaps that was what Joohyun had taken, although Seulgi saw no logical reason as to why this might be, or as to why she might react this way without a beating heart. Surely a lack of critical organ would have her body cease function, rather than confuse it. As time went by and her ears started to ring, she wished her body would have ceased function, rather than whatever this was.
She imagined that Joohyun had lost her own heart at some point, and the pain had become so unbearable that she had stolen Seulgi’s out of sheer desperation. She didn’t blame the woman; she only wished she had kept a spare.
It was one unbearable evening that she found herself on her knees next to the Cupboard With the Objects That Are Needed, slamming its doors open and shut to reveal empty shelves every single time. “Why won’t you help me?” she asked it. “You know I’m in pain.”
It did not answer her.
🕹
Joohyun returned on a day that Seulgi noticed was grey. There were dark circles under her eyes, visible still under layers of make-up. A diamond ring glinted on the fourth finger of her left hand.
“I’ve been busy,” she explained. It could have been an apology; Seulgi had no way of knowing. Was Joohyun the type to give away apologies carelessly, to anyone who would hear them? Or was she more like Seulgi, who found herself apologising constantly, to no one, simply for existing? Or was she lucky enough that she only had to apologise if she meant it? What did it mean if she meant it? Did she care about Seulgi?
Instead of all of that, Seulgi said, “The Imaginarium isn’t going anywhere. The photo booth again?”
This time, Joohyun swung herself high in the air on a swing, alone in the middle of a children’s playground. Its chains were rusted, leaving orange marks on her hands and the inside of her elbows. She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t frowning either. Seulgi didn’t have a word to describe how Joohyun appeared to be feeling, or lack thereof — she just knew she had felt it before. She had felt it more than once. Constantly, in fact.
In the background, people began to call Joohyun’s name, which made Joohyun clutch the chains tighter, swing higher. For a second, Seulgi forgot herself and tried to call out to Joohyun, to make her stop. ‘You’ll fall,’ she wanted to say, ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’
It wasn’t real. Seulgi reminded herself that it wasn’t real. It was only what Joohyun wanted.
Joohyun took a minute to collect herself once she stepped outside of the booth. She paused after pulling the curtain open, letting her eyes adjust to the store’s soft lights, its pink hue, the harsh fluorescent of its claw machines, and finally at Seulgi. She strode not towards the door where she usually rushed off once she was done with the booth, but towards the counter.
Seulgi’s heart — the one she believed had been stolen — beat up a storm in her chest.
Joohyun paused in the middle of the aisle, as if she was waiting for someone imaginary to finish making their payment. “I don’t know if I’ll be back,” she said, “But I’ll do my best.”
Seulgi laughed nervously. “I don’t know if that’s the point of the Imaginarium.”
Joohyun smiled in a way that wasn’t a smile. “Sometimes it’s all one has.”
Seulgi did not understand, so she nodded dumbly. She also thought Joohyun was too pretty, and therefore couldn’t much think about anything else.
Joohyun’s chest moved forward, as if she was about to leave, but her feet stayed in place. “Have you ever tried it?”
Seulgi blinked. “Tried what?”
“The photo booth.”
“Oh.” Had she? Now that she thought about it, she didn’t remember every trying any of the machines in the Imaginarium. She had never felt the need, and she never did anything she didn’t feel the need to do. She rarely had unexplainable urges to do things that didn’t make sense. Except for now, when some small voice within her asked her to beckon Joohyun closer.
She ignored it. “No. I just work here.”
Joohyun’s eyes widened. “I don’t know how you could ignore the temptation.”
“I don’t have any temptation.”
“None at all?”
Seulgi’s throat grew dry. She hadn’t been lying, but why did she feel like she was?
“It must be nice. To want for nothing. To be content.”
“Is that why you come back?” Seulgi asked. “To feel content?”
Joohyun frowned. “Partly,” she muttered under her breath. Seulgi only caught it because she was the only person in the room.
Joohyun’s chest moved forward and this time the rest of her body moved with it. Seulgi watched her go, her heels clicking against the tiled floor, the leather hiding the bruises forming on the knuckles of her feet. Her legs came to a stop at the door, and she turned around, one hand on the door handle.
“Good day,” Joohyun called.
Seulgi nodded back. “Good day.”
The air escaped out of Seulgi’s body and through the door as soon as it opened. It was magic, she decided. Joohyun was a sorceress, and she had put a spell on her.
🕹
Seulgi was unable to imagine a vivid location that was not the Imaginarium, because the Imaginarium was all she knew. The photo booth could not show one what they did not already know, and she did not know, for example, how sand felt between one’s toes, or the sensation of goosebumps after one jumped in and out of the cold seawater, or the smell of seaweed on the shore. Therefore, she could not vividly see a beach. She did not know, for example, the soreness of the legs after a steep climb, or the sound of branches crunching under one’s feet with each step, or true colours of a sunset over the horizon. Therefore, she could not vividly see a mountain. She did not know how to take in sign after sign after sign on an urban street, how to tune out the barrage of traffic noise from every direction, how to navigate one’s way efficiently through a crowded Friday evening sidewalk. Therefore, she could not vividly see a city.
She knew Joohyun, and Joohyun she saw vividly. Joohyun she felt vividly, in her arms, her hair against her lips and her nose, her breath against her collarbone, her hands rubbing soothing circles into her back as if Seulgi was the one that needed the comfort, as if Seulgi was the one that needed to be soothed.
Oh no.
Seulgi stumbled out of the booth before her session ended. Clumsily, she made her way over to the booth and watched the rest of her greatest desire through the console, in low quality, sound through the very quiet speakers — kept low for privacy and out of consideration for other customers — and unable to feel a thing.
Oh no.
When it was over, Seulgi zipped back to the booth and snatched her photo souvenir away, lest someone see it. No one was in the store, which is precisely why she’d given into the madness and tried the booth in the first place, but the idea that those photos could be sitting there any longer than they needed to be filled her with a feeling that she knew how to name, because she’d seen it radiate off of customers before: dread.
On one of the photos, Joohyun kissed her on the cheek. Happy smiles, happy cheeks, eyes so happy the pupils couldn’t be seen.
“Oh no,” she whispered out loud. She bent under the counter and placed the photos face down behind the box of tokens. Out of sight, she hoped, would put it out of mind.
🕹
The price Seulgi had paid for using the booth was her peace of mind.
She knew this to be true because she had seen the box in which it was kept appear on the shelves. It was a shiny, plastic thing of pale yellow and rounded corners. There was no lock or code to keep it shut and safe, yet Seulgi could not steal it back from the shelves for as soon as she tried to touch it, it would disappear and end up somewhere totally different.
It felt like her soul was unravelling. She would take to her shifts in a sweat, hot head, clammy palms, and the desperate need to sit down. She had never needed to sit down before.
This was banal. This work — gruelling, monotonous, thankless. The customers barely looked at her. The lights strained her eyes. Her feet hurt. The Cupboard never gave her what she needed, even though she was clearly in need of a glass of water. And no, that wasn’t how the Cupboard worked, but it should have been! It couldn’t be selective of people’s needs; that wasn’t very charitable!
For crying out loud, she worked here! She was entitled to 50% off at least!
Joohyun walked in on one such day, while she was grumbling to herself under her breath about how it was far too stuffy. Joohyun walked in dressed in all white and tulle and lace, fabric trailing behind her like the back half of a snake, and Seulgi was convinced that, in that moment, she had been gifted with the power of flight. She felt her chest and her heart within it pull her from the ground, but her feet felt like lead and kept her steady, unmoving. She still lacked that control that she had had when she was content, but it was different now. Addictive.
“Are you alright?” Joohyun asked first, before anything else.
Seulgi shook herself off till the rocking about of her chest soothed into the push and pull of the sea. It was still turbulent, beyond her control, but manageable. “Yes. The booth again?”
“No,” Joohyun said. “The stacker.”
Joohyun took ten tokens. She needed all of them.
Seulgi had enough presence to remember another customer who had come in asking to use the stacker. A boy — no, young man — lugging far too many books, a can of Red Bull in his hand, and looking a second away from his knees giving away cold at any moment.
“I’ll take anything,” he had explained. “Even that mp3 player. Whatever that does.”
“Do you need it?” Seulgi had asked back. “Whatever the mp3 player does. If you really tried, could you do it yourself? I only ask because the prize cube is very pricey.”
The boy had paused. His hair made an uncomfortable noise as he ran his hand through it. “I guess not.”
The Imaginarium existed only for those who needed it. Who had no other means of getting what it had to offer. The price was far too great a price to pay for those who had other options.
Joohyun needed ten tokens, and she used all of them. Her payment would be enough to sustain the store for years. As she used them, her veil draped over her shoulders and her dress billowed around her waist and Seulgi realised that she wanted to see Joohyun like this again.
She wanted to see herself like this too. She wanted to see herself and Joohyun like this, side by side, together in some unnamed, unimportant place.
‘You barely know her,’ Seulgi reminded herself. ‘You know her name and nothing else. How can you be—‘
Seulgi’s brain screeched to a halt before she could finish the sentence. Was it true? Was that what she was feeling?
In love?
Oh.
Oh no.
‘You mean nothing to her,’ Seulgi chanted in her head. ‘You mean nothing to her,’ she continued, even as Joohyun turned around, her prize in hand, victorious. Her eyes were wild and her grip around the car keys she had just won strong and scary, less like the fragile hold she had displayed in all of their earlier meetings and more like the soothing hands Seulgi had seen in her one experience in the booth.
‘You mean nothing to her,’ Seulgi repeated.
“Congratulations!” Seulgi chirped, feigning a smile. “Your new car will be waiting for you once you step outside.”
“I won’t be back,” Joohyun said, instead of ‘thank you’, or ‘that’s incredible’, or ‘I can’t believe it’.
“I see.”
Joohyun waited. Seulgi would say she stood there in silence, but it seemed like she was waiting, and waiting wasn’t silent. Waiting was filled with thoughts and hopes and feelings. Waiting was filled with the sight of Joohyun’s chest sinking and her lips forming a frown.
“Goodbye,” Joohyun told her. And she turned around and left out the door.
There was no one in the Imaginarium. It was a thankless job, and they didn’t even offer Seulgi a 50% discount, which she was entitled to.
Seulgi dropped to her knees and rummaged around the shelves for the set of photos she’d kept out of sight and out of mind, and ran out after Joohyun with them clutched in her hands.
It was sunny. The air smelt like Joohyun’s perfume without the undertones that humans usually carried. There were people walking left and right, across the Imaginarium’s doors, away from it, across the busy street. No one stopped to look at its windows or its sign. No one even noticed Seulgi standing there in ugly yellow and orange, in clothes that were nothing like the greys and creams and blacks of everyone else. But then she saw Joohyun, one foot into the driver’s seat of her new car in a big, white dress, and realised she looked different too.
“Hey!” Seulgi called, running up to her. Joohyun startled, gave Seulgi a once over. Her eyes lingered on the photo set in Seulgi’s hands. Seulgi wasn’t sure that she could see what was on them. “I’m sorry if this is forward, but may I come with you?”
Joohyun stared at her like she had grown a second head. After a few seconds, Seulgi lifted a hand to her neck, believing she really was growing a second head, when Joohyun breathed, “Yes.”
It took a bit of manouevering for Seulgi to get into the car, as she had never been in a car before. But once the door was closed, the seat pushed itself back to give her legs room, the leather warmed against her back, and warm air blew from a duct in a corner, making her numb hands regain their feeling.
Joohyun put the key in ignition. “Will you give me your hand? I feel as if I might explode.”
She did it without thinking, possessed. And before long, her heart had settled into that rhythm again. Turbulent, still, but on and off like a wave. Addictive.
🕹
It ended with what was once a customer. Seulgi didn’t work at the Imaginarium anymore, and Joohyun didn’t visit it, so she wasn’t sure if Joohyun could still be considered a customer of hers.
It ended on a farm, with dirt all the way up to their knees and hands full of freshly picked radishes. It ended in a kitchen that smelt like apple pie and clotted cream. It ended with a dip in a lake of still water at the end of an untrodden track, shielded from outside eyes by thick foliage and the threat of nippy mosquitoes. It ended with the two of them alone on a ferris wheel, looking over the exploding colour of a sky that is losing its sun. It ended on a beach and the ocean that Seulgi momentarily lost Joohyun to. It ended in the white expanse where they were finally reunited.
When it ended, both Seulgi and Joohyun, all on their own, were content.