Liar, Dreamer, Thief
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Synopsis
A young woman’s carefully constructed fantasy world implodes in this brilliantly conceived novel that blurs distinctions between right and wrong, comedy and tragedy, imagination and reality: "Surreal . . . leaves you with the creeping certainty that there is a different world lurking just under the surface of our own, filled with technicolor lies and terrible truths" (Alix E. Harrow, New York Times bestselling and Hugo‑award winning author).
Katrina Kim may be broke, the black sheep of her family, and slightly unhinged, but she isn’t a stalker. Her obsession with her co-worker, Kurt, is just one of many coping mechanisms—like her constant shape and number rituals, or the way scenes from her favorite children’s book bleed into her vision whenever she feels anxious or stressed.
But when Katrina finds a cryptic message from Kurt that implies he’s aware of her surveillance, her tenuous hold on a normal life crumbles. Driven by compulsion, she enacts the most powerful ritual she has to reclaim control—a midnight visit to the Cayatoga Bridge—and arrives just in time to witness Kurt’s suicide. Before he jumps, he slams her with a devastating accusation: his death is all her fault.
Horrified, Katrina combs through the clues she’s collected about Kurt over the last three years, but each revelation uncovers a menacing truth: for every moment she was watching him, he was watching her. And the past she thought she’d left behind? It’s been following her more closely than she ever could have imagined.
A gripping page-turner, as well as a sensitive exploration of mental health, Liar, Dreamer, Thief is an intimate portrayal of life in all its complexities—and the dangers inherent in unveiling people’s most closely guarded secrets.
Release date: January 10, 2023
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Print pages: 336
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Liar, Dreamer, Thief
Maria Dong
Her absence suits me just fine. The long stretches between our actual cohabitations are probably also our salvation, because even though there’s no reason for us not to get along, I have a tendency to hate people I spend too much time with, and I’ve been told I’m not a very good friend, despite my best efforts.
I guess I’m saying I have a habit of getting on everyone’s nerves—which is why I’m desperately fighting the urge to tell Leoni about my coworker Kurt’s new book. My fascination with Kurt is her biggest pet peeve, and she’s put me on notice more than once.
Kurt never takes his lunch in the break room. Instead, no matter how cold it is, he grabs his briefcase and his latest incredibly-expensive-looking phone and walks to his car in the company parking structure. Sometimes, I follow him at a distance, trying to catch a glimpse, but I usually use the opportunity to stroll by his desk and look for clues as to what makes him tick. He always keeps his current book in the second drawer from the bottom, and if he’s in a hurry, he doesn’t shut it all the way, which is how I’ve learned that he mostly reads history books: military strategy, secret orders, codes, mythical creatures. He never talks about history, though, and he’s never seemed like the kind of person who would buy into conspiracy theories.
If I can get the title of the book and the author’s name without attracting the attention of any neighboring coworkers, I write it on a yellow sticky note to look up when I get home—reviews, articles, Goodreads listings—collecting tasty facts with which I can engineer a greater understanding of the man known as Kurt Smith.
Leoni hates my interest in Kurt, which is why I try not to bring it up. But she’s been droning on about how the pregnant woman she was temporarily hired to replace might come back early, and how much she dreads talking to her recruiter at the staffing company.
“I swear to god, if I have to call him again about my stipend and hear porn in the background, I’m going to switch companies—”
Normally, I’m grateful for Leoni’s ability to keep a conversation going by herself, but on the phone, it’s hard to stay in the moment. And when I get bored, I lose sight of what’s around me, like the water-stained walls of my apartment or the half-closed, weeks-old pizza box on the coffee table I can’t seem to manage to throw out.
Instead, I’m tempted to peer into my version of the kitchen-door world—to watch the sands shift on the Beaches Strange and Wild, to immerse myself in the songs of the Enchanted Forest That Shimmers as It Sings, to witness the spectacle of hundreds of anthropomorphic once-travelers slumbering on moss as dragonflies wind their way through the breathy, fluting strains of music I’ve only heard in my mind.
My favorite thing to do, though, is to look for people’s analogues—to observe how my mind represents real people from my life in the kitchen-door world.
Not every person or place has an analogue, but important ones do, and they never change. Our apartment, for example, transforms into the hut Mi-Hee found when she first made it across the Beaches Strange and Wild: a stinking, one-room hovel with a leaky, thatched roof and crumbling walls covered in mold. It looked abandoned, and Mi-Hee needed a place to hide from the weather.
It wasn’t until the middle of the night that she realized it was full of ghosts.
The surrounding apartments in my building are also huts, though they are better maintained, save for our neighbor Mrs. Marple’s. I usually imagine her analogue as a robed grim reaper with a scythe, and her army of cats as a flock of tiny demons, each begging for tributes of human flesh. Grim reapers aren’t canonical to Mi-Hee’s kitchen-door world, so I’m not sure how they ended up in mine—although ever since I realized the book I read was a bad translation, I’ve wondered how much my kitchen-door world actually reflects Mi-Hee’s.
Leoni’s always a unicorn, which makes her analogue a shape-shifter, though she’s not nearly as brutal as the unicorns in the Vicious Valley, which spear liars and evildoers through the heart with their horns before ripping their bodies apart. When I imagine Leoni in her equine version, she’s the color of a pearl, with a long, flowing mane. Her human form in the kitchen-door world just looks like herself: a white girl just a bit taller and slimmer than average, with the kind of bleached pixie cut I wish I could pull off. She says it’s for her job, that long hair can get caught or pulled when you’re transferring patients, but I can’t help but think it makes her look like an early-aughts pop star.
Kitchen-door analogues always feel random, at first, but once I get to know the person or place better, I always learn there’s something that connects them to their analogue. Leoni’s temperament is a lot like the unicorns Mi-Hee encountered, which have a dual personality: so soft and kind they float across the grass without bending it, but carnivorous and bloodthirsty when threatened.
In a way, it’s always made me trust Leoni more. She’s unpredictable, until you understand her analogue.
I resolved a few days ago to no longer give in to the temptation of the kitchen-door world, even if my visits make me feel like I understand my own life better. I’ve known all along that carrying around an imaginary realm as a grown woman isn’t healthy, but it used to seem innocuous and fun—like scoping out an ex’s social media.
The strength of the visualizations has grown over time, though, as has my need to indulge in them whenever I’m stressed, bored, or just curious. Lately, it’s become compulsive and frantic—like finding out the ex you’re still in love with is dating someone new, and if you don’t figure out how this person stole them away from you, you’ll be doomed to an aching loneliness for the rest of your life.
It doesn’t matter that it’s bad for me, that the short-lived relief from the kitchen-door world can’t compete with the shame of needing it in the first place. It doesn’t even matter that I’m not always in control—that the kitchen-door world can overtake me through no choice of my own, that I can’t always tell what’s real and what isn’t. No matter what, I’m always just a breath away from slipping beneath its surface, from seeing and hearing the fantastic overlaid on everything around me.
The urge builds. If I looked into the kitchen-door world right now, Leoni would probably be in her human form—the swoops of her somehow always perfect eyeliner, a puckered red scar on her forehead to replace her horn. Before long, whispers trickle into the corners of my hearing, the rustle of a soft wind that hums with the wings of dragonflies.
There are too many things I want right now—to see her analogue, to tell her about Kurt, to hang up the phone—and the pressure of these desires is like the stretching over a pimple, the tension of an overflowing cup. Something has to give.
I blurt it out before I can stop myself. “Kurt’s reading a new book. One about medieval demons.”
“That’s fucking weird,” she snaps. It’s almost cruel, the way she says it, like a child’s condemnation on the playground.
“It’s not that weird.” I somehow don’t sound as defensive as I feel. “People have lots of interests—”
“You know what I mean. You need to stop doing that.” I can hear something in the background, a soft, mechanical hum like a fan, only more rhythmic. An air conditioner? Road noise? Or is it the music that emanates from the Enchanted Forest That Shimmers as It Sings?
“It was funny, at first. But you’re really becoming a stalker.”
As wounds go, this one’s deep. “I’m not a stalker.” It’s an amazing lie, because I believe it, despite knowing most people would disagree. The truth is that I do follow Kurt around, and I pay attention—I can tell you the books he reads, the music he listens to, that he has arugula-filled salads for lunch four days a week and treats himself to a sub sandwich on Fridays. That he always answers the phone with “Go for Kurt” and not “Hello”; that on summer weekends he takes his boat out on the water and forgets to put sunscreen on the tip of his nose, which burns so much faster than the rest of him; that his hair always smells faintly of pears. That sometimes, when he thinks nobody is looking, his face changes, the expressions melting off like wax, revealing something as hard and unreadable as concrete, like there’s an entirely different man under his skin. It reminds me of those white Greco-Roman statues, the way archaeologists recently discovered they were all once covered in garish paints—a secret, unless you know where to look.
I haven’t been able to figure out where Kurt lives yet, because like I said, I’m not really a stalker. I don’t break a bunch of laws in my quest to discover new things—but I’ve assembled enough clues in three years of following him around to know a lot about his inner world.
Like his deepest secret. I know that because it’s hidden in a box on my shelf.
“I’m not here to judge,” Leoni says. I have no idea how much time has passed since I last spoke. The hum gets louder.
“It’s just because it’s boring at Advancex.” This is another lie-not-lie. Yes, work is boring, but that’s not why I can’t stop seeking out Kurt.
I don’t know why I can’t stop.
“I know. But still, you could get in trouble. And he’s not really that interesting, anyways. I’d rather just hear about you. How are things at Advance-sex?” She makes her voice light, leaning on the pun that’s sent us giggling on quite a few wine nights—how, how could a Fortune 500 company not realize customers would see “Advancex” and think Advance-sex instead of Advance-ex?
“They’re okay.” I know I’m supposed to elaborate, but no matter how much I flail, there’s nothing else I can tell her—nothing happening in my life that isn’t related to Kurt or the kitchen-door world.
She clears her throat. “Listen… I’m starting to worry about you, you know.”
“There’s nothing to worry—”
“It’s not just this Kurt business, although that’s part of it. How has… have you still been seeing things?”
My throat closes up, but I manage to give her my best approximation of an exasperated sigh. “God, Leoni. We were both drunk. I was making it up—”
“I’ve seen you, though. At least with the numbers. Counting your steps, that kind of thing. Do you think—”
“There’s nothing wrong with me!” It’s sharp enough that I can hear her pull the phone away from her ear, and I take a deep breath. “I don’t think I’m Jesus, or that I can fly. I’m not washing my hands until they bleed. And nobody sends me secret messages over the radio.” All lame jokes, and I can tell from the silence between us that they land like frying pans.
Another pause. “Maybe you’re right, and you confessing to seeing a fantasy world around you—that you sometimes can’t tell what’s imaginary—maybe that was all drunk talk. Or maybe, you should consider seeing someone. Really, it couldn’t hurt.”
“Right,” I say, though she’s wrong. It can hurt. Therapy isn’t magic, and the wrong therapist can do more harm than good. “I’ll think it over, okay?” The edges of the world around me are starting to feel wavery, a sign of the kitchen-door world pressing in. This conversation is making me too upset. I have to get off the phone.
“Either way, you should stay away from Kurt. You don’t really know him, not the way you think you do—”
“Hey, someone’s calling. I’ve got to go.” I hang up before she can answer, but it’s too late. When I turn around, there’s a miniature forest of enchanted mushrooms growing in my kitchen, populated by dragonflies that dart back and forth, their bellies shining with the lights of the tiny fairy lanterns they carry. The entire room is cast in a soft purple glow, which I know is actually white and emanating from the hood lamp over the stove—but my eyes don’t see it, and after a few moments, I’m no longer sure. Is the light purple or white? Am I in my kitchen, the Enchanted Forest That Shimmers as It Sings—or both?
I close my eyes hard and count to eleven, focusing on the numbers, the way they feel as they take up space in my brain. With each one, the urge to slide into the kitchen-door world ebbs. When I’m finally brave enough to look again, the forest is gone, all save a single flower: a purple, five-pointed star that sits atop a woody stem so long it almost reaches my thigh.
I swallow. It’s a doraji—a perennial flower used in Korean medicine, though the roots are also frequently eaten: with rice, as a seasoned vegetable, as liquor or candy or tea. In English, they’re commonly referred to as “balloon flowers” for the puffy appearance of the buds before they open, though my mom always preferred their other name: bellflowers.
She brought the seeds with her when she first emigrated from Busan. She tended them until they took over half the backyard, a thicket of blue-purple flowers cheerfully impervious to the cold winters of Pleasance Village, Illinois.
Doraji weren’t described in Mi-Hee and the Mirror-Man. That isn’t to say they weren’t there—it was a Korean children’s book, after all—but what does it mean that after almost three years of seeing the book’s imaginary forest in my kitchen, there’s suddenly something new to find?
Though I know the flower isn’t real, I can’t help extending a finger toward it. Right before I brush the velvet of its petals, it shimmers into nothing.
When I said Mi-Hee’s spyglass revealed the truth, I didn’t mean facts, because people cannot be understood by their facts alone. I’ll prove this later, but for now, here are mine:
Once upon a time, I was on scholarship in music school, after somehow nailing the audition on my clarinet—a life choice my high-school band director of a father had warned me against many times, because music isn’t a career, not really, and no matter how much he actually loved his job, he didn’t want me to end up like him, sublimating his artistic desires to teach a passel of horny asshole teenagers—though I, at least, would never feel the burden of white suburban parents bent on the Ivies pretending they didn’t understand my accent.
And maybe my mental health was the best, and maybe it wasn’t, but what I can tell you is that I was good—good enough that my sophomore year, I was selected for soloist on a performance of K. 622, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major. I’d aced the audition, in no small part because the K. 622 was one of my father’s favorite pieces. The bouncy, mellifluous runs of notes that glide carelessly through the full range of the instrument, the way it’d been published posthumously without an autograph to explain how Mozart had wanted it to be performed. Musical historians can’t even agree on the exact instrument it’d been made for: the basset horn, the A clarinet, or the basset clarinet, none of which are common members of modern classical ensembles.
By then, my parents had already started pulling away and weren’t returning a lot of my calls. When they did, they always seemed distracted, as if there was something else they’d rather do. They’d assured me they would attend my performance, though—but when I sat there bathed in the bright lights, scanning the shadowy impressions of the audience for their silhouettes, I couldn’t find them.
It was like my muscles just solidified—my fingers, my tongue, my guts. I couldn’t move, and everything was going wavy. I managed to pull it together and blow into the mouthpiece, but it wasn’t notes—just squawks. There I was, onstage in front of a packed auditorium, honking like a goose.
I ran offstage. Threw up. Skipped class—weeks, then months—and then nobody paid the measly tuition bill that was left over after my scholarships had been applied. When they evicted me from the dorms, I went to my parents’ house, but my father wouldn’t let me in. We stood there on the porch, a mist of sleet quietly falling around us, until he handed me his keys. “Go to a hotel or a friend’s house,” he said. “We can talk about this later.”
Maybe things would have turned out differently if I’d confessed to failing out of college, to losing my scholarship. If I’d screamed at him about the bill. If I hadn’t lied about having money, lied about having friends.
I took their car to the Pleasance Sunbeam Library. I knew from a thousand childhood visits that it wasn’t open on Sundays, that it has a small employee lot around the back that’s obscured from the main road. I slept there that night, in the back seat of my parents’ car, my breath fogging the inside of the windshield as the evening cooled, eventually turning to frost. When I woke shivering at dawn and looked out, I didn’t see anything through the ice but soft shapes—and then I closed my eyes, and there it was, a door hanging in the corner of my mind, one I hadn’t seen since I was a child and obsessed with a book about a girl and a spyglass. I saw myself stepping through, and for a moment, everything smelled like smoke.
I turned the car on and let the engine warm. I scraped the ice—on the outside, on the inside, the legacy of my frozen breath—until there was a hole large enough to see. And then I pulled onto the highway and drove the two and a half hours to the big city, to Grand Station, Illinois, thinking I’d make a new life for myself, one where I was a hero, and successful, and loved.
And if I sometimes slipped into Mi-Hee’s world and saw things that weren’t really there, if I sometimes leaned into my fantasies just for the smell of smoke and beach sand, if I found myself drawing a special sigil on my apartment doors with my finger to ward off the deaths of my family in strange, gruesome ways—the same way Mi-Hee’s counting warded off evils in the book—well, that was okay, because I had a dream, a story, a new life.
But I was wrong, because the life I live now isn’t new. It’s just a copy of the one I left behind, and I don’t know the way back.
After I hang up on Leoni, after Mi-Hee’s mushroom forest disappears, I take a seat on the plush gray-green couch—Leoni’s couch, because I, of course, didn’t bring any furniture with me when I moved in—and spend an hour trying to turn down the volume on the worries circling my brain, the feeling of unrightness that presses into my skin like insistent fingertips. I need to make sure I’ve got a handle on things, that for at least a little while, I’ll be more firmly in this world than out of it.
There are rituals I can do, ones I started developing long before I’d first read Mi-Hee’s book: counting, reciting, drawing my sigil, moving in symmetrical patterns with the right number of repetitions. Little actions that make me more certain nothing bad will happen, that I won’t lose control of myself—but they’re only partial measures. Not like going out to the Cayatoga Bridge, which tears out my bad feelings at the root.
But I can’t go to the bridge right now. I always go right before midnight, because that’s when I went the first time, when I discovered its power—and I’m terrified if I change any aspect of the ritual, the bridge won’t work for me anymore, and I’ll be stuck here, in this body, forced to trudge through this mess without it.
I decide to do the next best thing—draw my sigil, which is composed of four endekagrams: eleven-pointed, star-shaped forms made by connecting the points of an eleven-sided regular polygon. I draw it on the legs of my jeans, my pointer fingernail tugging gently on the bumps of the fabric. Eleven stacked sigils on one pant leg, eleven on the other, keeping careful count: the more elaborate the shape and the more powerful the number of repetitions, the better it will work, but only if I execute it perfectly, and keep it balanced on each side. Eleven is one of my favorite numbers to use: prime, hard to balance, and uncommon in nature, all of which give it strength—but it’s still small enough and common enough that I feel I can control it.
By the time I’m done, another hour has passed, and I’m almost certain the mushroom forest isn’t coming back. My anger at my roommate, though, is simmering to a boil.
I should be grateful to Leoni, who makes my entire life possible. This apartment may be a disaster—the spots of mold on the popcorn ceiling, the chipped stove with its single working burner, the unpredictable heat that sometimes roasts us in hellfire and sometimes leaves us chilled to the bone—but I also can’t afford it on my own. I’m not even sure how Leoni affords it. I know she likes living in Grand Station for the location and transportation, that between the train, the highways, and the nearby regional airport, it’s easy for her to get to her various travel therapy assignments. The hospital system is also pretty good, which is important—her sister is sick, some disease with a name I can never remember, though I know it’s chronic and makes it hard to breathe, and it means she has to live in a residential care facility with round-the-clock monitoring.
I worry all the time that Leoni will move. If she decides she wants to relocate her main home hub and her sister to somewhere cheaper, I’m not sure what I’ll do. When my temp agency, Spectacular Staffing, called to say they’d found me a placement at a “hospital revenue cycle management” company called Advancex, I’d never heard of it, but they were offering me fifteen dollars an hour. I needed the money, because it was September, and I was sleeping in my car. The days were still warm, but that would change soon. The last remnants of summer in this part of Illinois always break like a wave, less than two weeks before the cold comes on, and the nights were already filling the windshield with frost. There was no way I’d survive dead winter, with its Lake Effect snow.
But I couldn’t work at a place like Advancex without somewhere to stay. I’d just arrived from Pleasance Village and I didn’t know anyone—and I’d been evicted when I failed out of school. Even if I somehow managed to talk a landlord into renting to me, the Advancex building was on Main Street, at the very throbbing heart of Grand Station. No way fifteen dollars an hour would be enough to rent anywhere close to there—and especially not fifteen dollars an hour at a temp job, which didn’t count as real income for any rental agency I called unless I’d been working there full-time for at least a year.
I had no deposit, no acceptable proof of income. I couldn’t get to the job without a nearby (enough) apartment; I couldn’t get the apartment without a year at the job. The harder I tried to grab on to the situation, the more it slipped away.
I’ve done a lot of dangerous things in my life, but sometimes I think the worst was posting an ad on craigslist, detailing my situation, begging for help. If someone could take pity on me, if they had a room to rent—I’ll be a model tenant. I have a good job at Advancex and a car. Anywhere within an hour of downtown. Please.
A lot of creeps replied, describing in great detail what they’d do to my hands, my face, my body. But then, like a unicorn parting the glade, Leoni arrived to save me, though I was no deserving virgin as per the medieval stories.
I have a place. It’s not too far from there. You’re… not a serial killer, are you?
No, I’d replied, my heart beating as hard as it does when I hike across the bridge. I’m a vegetarian.
So was Hitler.
That was actually a myth created by his propaganda department.
As soon as I clicked SEND, the shock of what I’d done hit me. I’d corrected this person, the only earnest response to my ad. They were probably never going to reply again—
I hoped you’d say that. Do you want to meet up at Bin-Bash for some coffee and see how we get along?
Thinking now of how I’d held the phone to my chest and cried, my anger cools some—but only a little. The truth is that Leoni doesn’t understand how I feel about Kurt, because she can’t. She doesn’t have a secret like Kurt and I do, access to a world larger than the one she sees.
But when that thought enters my brain, it drags in another—Are you sure? Are you sure?—and suddenly, all the calm I. . .
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