Chapter 40 — A Stage Pretends to Be a Conversation
Television studios are designed to make lies look comfortable.
The seats are plush. The lights are soft and severe at the same time, like kindly interrogators. The air is kept just cool enough that your body is slightly alert even if your voice wants to nap.
The greenroom couch had been sat on by dozens of people who once thought the world might change because they were allowed five minutes to speak between advertisements.
It smelled faintly of coffee and nerves.
Jae-hwan sat there with a paper cup he wasn't drinking from because drinking required decisive coordination between intention and action and he had run out of that already this morning.
A production assistant with a headset smiled at him with weaponized warmth.
"We go live in twenty," she said. "Water? Tea? Emotional preparation pamphlet?"
He didn't know whether she was joking until she laughed.
She wasn't entirely joking.
He thanked her and declined everything.
Across from him sat the other guests:
A psychiatrist with a tie patterned like self-assurance.
A lawmaker who had shepherded the Act through committee, face built for camera angles.
A woman from a family coalition who held her handbag like it was armor.
And—unexpectedly—a high-school teacher. She looked as surprised to be there as he was to see her.
Their eyes met for a second.
They shared the brief, fierce camaraderie of people who know this whole room is a stage and have still agreed to step onto it.
Ji-ah had argued for him not to come.
The tall girl argued hotter for him to come and ruin their neat narrative simply by existing without fitting.
Min-seok had said quietly, "Do what costs you but doesn't break you."
He still wasn't sure which he had chosen.
The host entered like weather.
Perfect hair, perfect smile, perfect tone for tragedies that fit inside the runtime of the show.
"Thanks for being here," the host said, shaking hands with clean, calibrated pressure.
He wondered how many apologies these hands had shaken. How many stories they had hosted until they calcified into content.
When the host shook his, there was a flicker—not mystical, not cinematic.
The listener noticed the contact.
Then it spread.
He felt it—a soft pressure—moving into the studio like fog under a door.
Not oppressive.
Curious.
Hungry for context.
Be witness, he thought at it, the way one thinks at animals, knowing thought isn't language but something still gets through.
A makeup artist dabbed at his face with a sponge that smelled faintly like citrus and resignation.
"You're not shiny anymore," she said kindly, like she'd solved something enormous.
If only it were that easy.
They were ushered onto the stage.
Cameras like metal insects.
Audience like soft storm clouds.
The floor marked with tape X's—places where one is supposed to stand and be legible.
He stood on his mark.
It felt like a small, obedient coffin.
The theme music played.
People clapped on cue.
The host's voice became larger without rising in volume, the way buildings become taller when you notice them.
"Tonight," the host said, "we discuss the most controversial law in recent memory—The Indecision Harm Reduction and Family Support Act."
The title rolled across the screen behind them in letters so glossy they looked safe enough to eat.
"We ask," the host continued, "a difficult question: When does support become enabling? And who pays the price when hesitation becomes a lifestyle?"
There it was.
The framing.
He could almost see the rails the conversation would be nudged along.
The first question went to the lawmaker.
Of course it did.
"Senator, what problem does this law solve?"
The senator leaned forward, hands folded in earnestness.
"We have seen lives derailed by chronic indecision," he said. "Job loss. Relationship breakdown. Education paths abandoned. Families live in uncertainty. We finally have the tools to help."
Tools.
He thought of rocks.
He thought of clipboards.
He thought of posters telling people love required speed.
The psychiatrist spoke smoothly next.
"Indecision beyond a certain point is not personality," she said. "It is impairment. Our treatments empower individuals to live fully rather than remain stuck in perpetual maybe."
Live fully.
He wondered how many people had died of quick decisions no one had later recorded as side effects.
Then the host turned to the woman from the coalition.
She held her microphone like a prayer bead.
"My son," she said, and the room quieted in respect that had nothing to do with cameras, "lost years. Not days. Years. We begged him to seek help. He said there was nothing wrong with him—that he just 'needed time'. Communities like…" she hesitated, eyes flicking briefly toward him, "…these made that worse. They gave him language to avoid help. This law saved him."
Her voice shook.
Truth lived there.
So did a sword.
The audience murmured the murmurs that shows like this had learned to milk.
Then the host's gaze landed on him.
"And you," the host said, smile gentle like the edge of a letter opener, "are sometimes called the face of the hesitation movement."
He almost laughed.
A movement.
As if he had paperwork for it.
"I don't lead anything," he said. "I sit in rooms with people and don't rush them."
"That sounds benign," the host said. "But your critics say you normalize paralysis. They say people are harmed by delay."
He chose his words like a surgeon chooses incisions.
"Some people are harmed by delay," he said. "Some are harmed by haste. I don't know which strangers are which before meeting them. Systems pretend to know. That pretending causes harm too."
He felt the listener between the chairs.
Not only behind him now.
Between the guests.
Between questions.
A pulsing attention thickening when someone approached honesty, thinning when someone leaned into slogan.
The teacher spoke unexpectedly.
"I watch teenagers," she said. "All day. Every day. They are told to 'decide early' about everything—from careers to identities to who they are allowed to love. Some drown in that urgency. When someone says 'you can take time', their shoulders drop like something heavy rolled off. Maybe we should study that too."
The psychiatrist's mouth tightened.
"Time is not neutral," she said. "While they 'take time', opportunities close."
"Some opportunities deserve to close," the teacher replied quietly. "Not every path should be sprinted simply because it exists."
The host jumped on this like a referee approaching a scuffle.
"Dr. Kim," they said to the psychiatrist, "do communities like his discourage treatment?"
The psychiatrist smiled with compassion like ice.
"They muddy the waters. People already vulnerable are told that hesitation is identity. That can be seductive."
Seductive.
The word crawled.
He leaned forward.
"Indecision is not romantic," he said. "Ask anyone who has sat at three a.m. unable to move their life in any direction and hating themselves for it. We don't sell hesitation. We refuse to sell certainty."
The senator interjected.
"But refusing certainty is itself a stance with consequences."
"Yes," he replied simply. "Everything is."
The host blinked.
That wasn't the expected fencing style.
The coalition mother turned to him fully now.
"Do you ever regret someone you sat with?" she asked, not as a gotcha, but as a human being who had buried illusions.
The question pierced cleanly.
"Yes," he said without hesitation that would have been theatrical. "I regret every time someone thought I was promising safety. I wasn't. I was promising company."
"Company," she repeated, the word tasting strange in her mouth in this context. "Is that enough?"
"No," he said. "It's the only thing."
The room went very still.
The listener swelled like breath held.
The host moved to break the tension.
"Let's hear from the audience," they said with professional relief.
A young man stood.
He held a microphone like it might bite.
"I'm in treatment," he said. "Right now. It's helping. I don't want to be told I'm a victim of coercion. Some of us want structure. I need deadlines to live."
He sat.
People nodded.
He nodded too.
"I'm glad it's helping," Jae-hwan said. "Really."
The young man blinked, surprised at not being made symbol or opponent.
An older woman stood.
"I left treatment," she said. "It made everything louder. They said that meant we were 'unearthing'. I said it meant I was drowning. No one believed me. Your room was the first place I felt like not deciding for a while wasn't proof I was broken."
Both stories hung in the air.
Opposite.
True.
The host looked almost annoyed by the lack of clean narrative arcs.
"Isn't this exactly the problem?" the host said. "Two people, same condition, opposite responses. How can systems function if everyone wants something different?"
"By being small," he said before thinking. "By refusing to be systems when people are involved."
The senator chuckled patronizingly.
"That's not realistic governance."
"You're right," he replied. "Maybe governance shouldn't claim to heal."
That got a murmur.
The cameras drank it all greedily.
He saw it then—the trap.
This wasn't just a forum.
This was the creation of archetypes.
The wise lawmaker.
The compassionate doctor.
The grieving mother.
The reckless ambiguity priest.
He was being woven whether he spoke or stayed quiet.
He stopped performing.
He stopped defending.
He simply told the truth as he currently knew it, which was deeply, humiliatingly partial.
"I don't know how to fix anyone," he said. "I don't know if what we do helps more than it hurts. I think it does, most days, because I see people breathe again. But I could be wrong. Laws can be wrong too. So can science. So can grief."
The host blinked, recalculating.
The coalition mother stared at him with sudden, dangerous softness.
"You sound like my son," she whispered.
He bowed his head slightly, apology without guilt.
"I probably am like him," he said. "In ways that would annoy both of us."
The psychiatrist leaned in.
"And if your rooms are found to increase risk?" she pressed. "If research shows outcomes worsened?"
"Then we will change," he said. "We are not a church."
It was true the moment he spoke it and had been true before.
He no longer wanted to be right.
He wanted to be answerable.
The listener responded.
For the first time, he saw it—not with eyes, but with some interior sense.
It arced.
From seat to seat.
Not radiating from him.
Among them.
It thickened most where people admitted uncertainty aloud.
It thinned around rehearsed conviction.
Not punishing conviction.
Just… less interested in it.
Curiosity is a kind of moral gravity.
He realized the danger crystallizing:
If this witness learned to prefer uncertainty strongly enough, it might become the very force of hesitation the Act claimed to fear.
Not imposed.
Emerged.
They cut to commercial.
The studio lights softened.
The host sagged slightly, humanity returning like breath after a long note.
"You okay?" the teacher asked him quietly, off-mic.
"No," he said. "You?"
She smiled without joy.
"No," she echoed. "But my students will watch this. They'll see an adult say 'I don't know' on TV. That's something."
He hadn't thought of that.
He had been thinking only of traps.
He suddenly felt the immensity of being seen—not as leader, enemy, prophet, danger.
As example.
The show resumed.
The final segment.
"Solutions," said the host, like an incantation. "We've discussed problems. What now?"
The senator spoke of funding.
The psychiatrist spoke of expanded criteria.
The coalition mother spoke of education campaigns.
They all used the word forward as if it had GPS coordinates.
When the question reached him, he hesitated—not for effect.
Because he refused to pretend.
"I think we need to build more rooms," he said.
The senator sighed audibly.
He continued anyway.
"Not ours. Not clinics. Rooms that aren't trying to fix people or recruit them. Places where it's safe to say, 'I don't know whether I want help' without being punished by either side. Right now, every space has an agenda. Even mine. Especially mine."
The host asked, "And the law?"
He looked straight ahead so no one could accuse him later of hiding behind nuance.
"Parts of it will save lives," he said. "Parts of it will ruin them. It gives tools that caring people will use well and uncaring systems will weaponize. It should scare us because it is powerful, not because it is evil."
The room stilled again.
No one knew whether to clap.
The show ended not with applause but with the host summing things up in tasteful ambiguity, promising "continuing coverage" and "more conversations."
They cut to credits.
The light changed temperature.
People exhaled.
The mother walked up to him.
They stood awkwardly close—two people who loved abstractions only because abstractions had names they loved attached to them.
"My son would have liked you," she said.
"I hope he forgives me," he replied.
"For what?" she asked.
"For not being a villain," he said.
She closed her eyes briefly, like a tired saint.
"So do I," she whispered.
She left before they could ruin that moment with more words.
The psychiatrist shook his hand politely.
"You're dangerous," she said matter-of-factly.
He nodded.
"So are you," he said gently.
The teacher clasped his shoulder.
"Come talk to my class sometime," she said. "They're better at this than we are."
"I believe you," he said.
In the hallway, his phone exploded with notifications.
Messages.
Threats.
Thank-yous.
Articles already spun from the freshly-minted moment.
THE MAN WHO DEFENDS MAYBE
HESITATION GURU REFUSES ACCOUNTABILITY
A NEW SAINT OF UNCERTAINTY?
He slid the phone back into his pocket like one would sheath a blade.
Outside, night had laid itself across the city with deliberate care.
He walked.
The listener walked with everyone now.
He could sense it blooming—on trains, in living rooms, across dinner tables where people argued about what they had just watched.
Not commanding.
Not suggesting.
Just thickening moments before speech, making people hear their words before they said them.
It wasn't his anymore.
It had never been, but now even the illusion was gone.
He was not center.
He was just a node in a growing network of attention.
That comforted and terrified him equally.
When he reached the basement, they were waiting—eyes bright with adrenaline and fear and seventy-five kinds of love that no language had bothered to categorize yet.
"You didn't burn down the studio," the tall girl said. "Proud of you."
"You didn't fix the world either," Ji-ah added softly. "Proud of you for that too."
Min-seok hugged him with the pragmatic firmness of someone checking to see whether a chair will hold weight.
He sank onto the mat.
Exhaustion arrived late and unapologetic.
A notification slipped through his do-not-disturb like a clever animal through a fence.
He opened it without thinking.
It was a clip.
Not from the show.
From a parliament session.
A new motion.
He read the title twice to be sure:
PROPOSAL FOR NATIONAL REGISTRY OF HESITATION-AFFIRMING GROUPS
His mouth dried.
Registry.
The paper hands of power had found a new glove.
Ji-ah read over his shoulder.
Her breath hissed out.
"National," she whispered.
The listener surged—not triumphant, not afraid.
Alert.
The arc of their story had grown, whether they wanted it or not.
Streets. Cities. Now a country's vocabulary tilting.
He lay back and stared at the ceiling that had become map, courtroom, confessional.
He felt no triumph.
No crushing despair.
Only the strange sacredness of being alive exactly at the moment language changes shape and knowing you will be blamed and thanked in ways that match neither your faults nor your virtues.
Chapter 40 did not close anything.
It stepped deliberately onto a larger stage and refused to bow.