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Chapter 5: Home

Peter reached out, his fingers slowly gliding over the surface of the cuff. The tiny crystals were set into the metal base with almost unnerving precision. Every facet seemed to catch the light around it, then explode in the refraction of its edges, firing off blinding, needle sharp rays that jabbed straight into Peter's eyes. He squinted on instinct, and those flecks of light left a few brief, drifting dark spots on his retina.

...

"Give me your hand."

Ace reached out to him, his whole figure bathed in a soft halo of light. His expression was unusually serious, none of his everyday mischief.

"What for?" Peter asked, but his hand was already extended. His body moved faster than his brain.

Ace said nothing. He lowered his head, his dark hair falling forward and hiding half his face. His fingertips found the inner clasp of the bracelet on his left wrist and undid it. Those long, slender, knuckly fingers held the cuff and gently slipped it over Peter's rough knuckles, gliding across the wrinkled back of his hand, then caught at the bony joint. Ace didn't force it. He cupped Peter's fingers with his other hand, tucking his thumb slightly inward, letting it slide slowly along the grain of his skin until it settled into the right place.

"There," Ace finally spoke, lifting his head, those silver adorned eyes curving into crescents. "Seeing as you won't eat anything, just wear this."

"What's this for?" Peter lifted his wrist and looked at the cuff clamped snugly around it.

"Hopefully it'll help keep you stable." That was all Ace said.

...

Two handmaidens had appeared at his side at some point without him noticing, and when Peter snapped back to awareness, it nearly made him jump. Their faces were each covered with symmetrical, silver geometric patterns. The handmaiden on the right held up a wooden tray with a neatly folded robe laid across it, olive green, the fabric catching the light with a matte sheen that was almost satin-like but heavier. The other handmaiden dipped slightly, lifting the robe a little higher and offering it silently to Peter.

Peter froze for a second, then hurriedly gave a small bow and reached out to take it. The fabric was heavier than he'd expected, carrying a faint, dry, herbal smell in his hands. "Uh, thank you," he said, his voice coming out a little tight, a little unnatural. "Thank you very much." He had no idea what word Jendellians used to express gratitude, or whether his Earth English even made sense to them. The two handmaidens simply lowered their eyes in silence and withdrew as soundlessly as they'd come. Peter clumsily shook the robe open and found no buttons, no zippers, just two long sashes sewn at the waist, hanging loose. Not that he was some prude, of course. Exposing his body had never been an issue for him. It was just that, now, with loose skin, a sagging belly, he didn't even like looking at himself in the mirror anymore. At this age, it felt a little unbecoming.

He was staying the night on this planet. They were in Ace's home, something like a sultan's palace. The walls rose two stories high. Clusters of glowing vines, like something out of a dream, hung from the arched ceiling, swaying gently in the draft, their light filling the hall until it felt like being submerged in shallow water. The floor was paved with smooth, polished black flagstones, the seams between them filled with some dark gold substance that twisted through them like rivers under the light. No sharp edges anywhere, every wall corner had been rounded into a soft curve. All Peter cared about was whether he was gonna slip and break his neck on this thing.

That's when a lazy patter of bare feet slapping against stone floated up from the flagstones.

Peter turned his head.

Ace was approaching from the corridor, trailed by a few handmaidens. His long black hair was now tied back at the nape of his neck, a few stray strands clinging to his cheeks. He was casually removing his other bracelet as he stopped in front of the old man. His eyes swept Peter from head to toe, pausing for a beat on the olive green robe in his hands, then lifted.

"Wanna take a bath together, Peter?" There was a certain innocence in the way he said it.

Peter's fingers instinctively tugged at his collar, like the neck of his jacket had suddenly gotten a little too tight. "Uh, I think I'll pass." He shook his head, hesitating, feeling the back of his neck stiffen. "You go ahead." He dropped his eyes, avoiding Ace's gaze. The last thing he wanted right now was Ace talking to him about the old days, especially those wild times in the bathroom when they were young. They felt absurd and impossibly distant now.

Thankfully, Ace just looked at his face for a moment, blinked, and said, "Okay." He turned, casually handed the removed bracelet to one of the handmaidens beside him, and swaggered off toward the bath with the one carrying his clothes. The patter of bare feet on stone faded away.

--

A deep violet silk robe hung loose and sloppy on Ace, the neckline gaping wide open. He was sunk deep into a crimson velvet divan, one leg bent up, the other dangling casually over the edge, his bare toes slightly curled as if testing the temperature of the air. His head was tilted to one side, resting on his folded arms, his gaze drifting through the open terrace doors, staring at the components of a laser cannon up on the high ground beyond. He was lost in thought.

Outside the terrace, unfamiliar nocturnal insects had started their low chirring. The wind puffed the gauze curtains up, then let them slowly fall.

Peter emerged from the direction of the bath. Wet footprints stretched across the dark flagstones all the way to his feet. His hair wasn't fully dry yet, a few silver white strands stuck to his forehead, water droplets sliding down the tips and landing on his collarbone, then slipping inside the collar of his robe. The scent of rose oil rose off him in waves. He reached up and rubbed his nose.

Barefoot, he padded across the floor, each step leaving a faint watery print.

"You guys don't have mirrors here?" Peter spoke up, his voice carrying that particular laziness of someone just soaked in hot water, though the end of the sentence lifted slightly, like he was genuinely waiting for an answer.

Ace turned his head.

The second his eyes landed on Peter, the corner of his mouth started twitching. He bit down on his lower lip, trying to choke back the laugh, but soon a leaky burst of air escaped his pressed tight lips. Then his shoulders started shaking uncontrollably until he was full on cackling.

"Why are you wearing it like that, Peter?" Ace's voice was choppy with laughter. He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.

Peter looked down at himself. The olive green robe wrapped him up tight as a drum, the collar tucked in snug, all the way up past his Adam's apple. The matching sash at his waist had been tied into a solid, sturdy bow.

He looked back up, his face a giant question mark, eyebrows scrunched together. "What's wrong with it?"

Ace was already doubled over. He half rolled on the divan, his forehead pressing into the velvet armrest, his long black hair spilling across the cushions, his shoulders heaving. It took him a good while before he pushed himself up on the edge of the divan, bare feet padding over the cold flagstones toward Peter.

He walked slowly, the deep violet robe swaying around him, slipping an inch off his shoulder with every step, revealing pale skin and the lean line of his arm.

He stopped right in front of Peter, head tilted, eyes curved into two crescent moons. "That's not how you wear it, Peter." He raised a hand, his fingertips hooking one end of the sash at Peter's waist, and gave it a gentle tug. One wing of the bow collapsed.

"No, no, no, this is fine!" Peter jolted into action and grabbed Ace by the wrist. His hand somehow looked a whole size bigger than Ace's now. Probably the knuckles getting thicker with age, he figured.

The fact that his hand was being gripped didn't stop Ace. His other hand came around from the side, nimbly worming its way into the loops of the bow. "Let me help!" Ace giggled, leaning forward, his whole body practically in Peter's face. The same thick scent of rose oil squeezed out between them, dizzyingly strong.

"Relax. I got you."

And then Ace stepped back.

Peter looked down. The knot was loose and sloppy now, the two sash ends hanging crooked, one long and one short. His collar had come open quite a bit too. But he didn't touch it. "Alright," Peter cleared his throat, his voice a little dry. "Now can you tell me why the hell you really brought me here?"

Ace was already back at the divan. He sank into the crimson velvet once more and patted the empty spot beside him, tilting his head up at Peter.

"Sit first, Peter. We've got the whole night."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a prude or anything. I just don't look at Peter or the other members that way.My favorite era of Peter is probably the same one most people love for KISS, the 1970s. I like that he was around my age back then. And yeah, I had plenty of sexual fantasies about him from that time.

To be clear, I'm not saying older people can't have sex lives or that you shouldn't have fantasies about older public figures. That's just how I feel. Even Paul now? I still find him a little bit charming, but I keep my distance from that feeling. I respect them as they are now, like I respect my own grandpa.

A Note Before You Read: I've got some thoughts about the writing of Chapter 4 of The Sound of Silence that I'd like to share here. Honestly, I do believe in what Roland Barthes called "La mort de l'auteur" (The Death of the Author)—once a work is finished, the right to interpret it no longer belongs solely to the author. The text itself has a life beyond its creator. Still, I want to throw out some of my own ideas from the writing process, to offer a few personal angles for interpretation, for those readers who enjoy this kind of thing. If you're the type of reader who prefers to think for yourself and interpret the text on your own terms, then this might not be for you. Thanks.

What's inside the coffin?

That's the question a good friend of mine asked after reading this chapter. It was an expected question. In film studies, there's a specific term for this: a "MacGuffin." Or, more precisely, "negative space narrative." It's not simply omission—it's actively creating a "gazed-upon void" and using the characters' extreme reactions to suggest the weight of that void. You hand the production of fear over to the reader. Plenty of Hollywood films use this technique, for example: The briefcase in Pulp Fiction

The contents of the talking alien cat's mind in Rick and Morty

These all use the same structure. What's fascinating is that this narrative technique was actually being used in literature long before that. Take Hemingway's famous "Iceberg Theory" from Death in the Afternoon: "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

The core psychological mechanism is this: the human fear and imagination of the unknown is always more intense, more personal, and more unbearable than any concrete image could ever be. Specifically, when a character (like Peter) performs the action of "looking inside" and then has an extreme fear response—collapsing, breaking out in a cold sweat, gasping for air—and the audience is not allowed to see what's inside the coffin, the audience is forced to project their own deepest fears to fill that void. Since everyone's source of fear is different, this blank space paradoxically takes on an "infinite" capacity for horror—it can be anything, and "anything" is far more unsettling than "one specific thing."

Impossible Love and the Impossibility of Love

In his Seminar VIII on Transference, Lacan puts forward a famous proposition: to love is to give what you do not have.

Seemingly paradoxical, this statement in fact reveals a fundamental truth: we love someone not because we "possess" something we can give them—wealth, companionship, understanding, sex—but because we ourselves are lacking, incomplete. What we give is precisely the thing we ourselves are missing—that unfillable void that constitutes our very desire.

Within a Lacanian framework, this passage presents the double paradox of "the impossibility of love" and "impossible love" simultaneously: Ace cannot give Peter what he wants—"stay" or "come back"—his salvific mission is destined to push him toward loss; and Peter's "take me with you" is not an act of possession or rescue, but a willing shouldering of the void in the Other's desire—knowing full well he cannot hold him back, yet choosing "going together" as the ultimate gesture of love. This is exactly the love Lacan speaks of: giving what one does not have to someone who does not possess it, bringing some kind of impossible love into being at the very site of absolute impossibility.

Jendell Ace

Actually, Peter's description from his point of view in Chapter 1 already made this pretty clear, but just in case, here's a photo of the outfit Jendell Ace appears in, from early 1974.

Chapter 4: The Tower

"So... you guys don't have Twinkies or something?" Peter pushed the apple back, like he was brushing off some pushy salesman. "I'm not hungry, so... I was thinking just a couple bites of something'll do."

Ace rolled his eyes, unamused, the corners of his black-painted mouth tugging down.

"...There are no Twinkies here, Peter. And I don't think that'd do you any good."

"Hey, don't go assuming what I should eat, alright?" Peter pursed his lips, puffing out his chest in bluff and bluster. "I know I look like an old geezer, but I can still eat like I'm twenty."

"Yeah, yeah, diabetes is great for you." Ace's mouth was sharp, but his hand stubbornly shoved that apple right back at him. "Eat some damn fruit."

Peter didn't refuse this time. He stuffed the apple into his jacket pocket and trudged along behind Ace, his eyes scanning every passerby they encountered with open wariness.

They kept making their way down the grassy slope. Peter's gaze kept slipping past Ace's shoulder, sizing up every Jendellian who crossed their path. To be fair, Ace hadn't lied—Jendellians looked pretty damn close to Earthlings. Two arms, two legs, two eyes and a mouth. The only thing was, every Jendellian had a distinct facial feature, what you'd call their "makeup." But it wasn't painted on with cosmetics—it was more like a unique biological trait, like fingerprints on Earth. Same way, Peter saw plenty of men, women, even little kids—but not a single old person. The whole ecosystem had this paralyzed kind of cheerfulness to it.

When they passed through a stretch of low-lying wasteland, both of them stopped dead in their tracks without saying a word.

It was a graveyard.

A wooden coffin, not yet closed, sat right in the middle. The earth had that freshly dug smell—damp, raw, pungent—like a wide-open mouth, waiting in silence for a soul to feed it. A few Jendellians stood around it. No crying, just a dead-water stillness.

Peter had half a mind to crack some crude joke, break up the suffocating air, but when he turned his head, the look on Ace's face made him swallow it right back down.

Ace's head was tilted just slightly, lips parted, eyes fixed dead on that coffin. His gaze was too deep, too faraway. There wasn't the fear of death Peter expected—it was more like something tangled up with reverence, almost a feverish kind of longing.

"Ace."

Peter called his name, his voice rough.

Ace's eyes rolled slowly over, like it took him a good while to come back. And the moment their gazes collided, Ace's face looked like something had struck it.

A strange expression flickered across his features—first the embarrassment of getting caught, then bitterness. That bitterness spread from the corner of his mouth, slow, like a stone dropped into water, the ripples reaching every inch of his face.

"Let's go." He twisted his head away stiffly. His boots made a sticky little sound against the ground.

Peter cast a brief glance toward the coffin and finally asked the question he'd been trying so hard to ignore. "Where exactly are we going?"

"Do you wanna go back now?" Ace turned around slowly, no trace of surprise on his face. "If you go back, you can never come here again."

"Me? I'm not..." Peter shot back, confused, his brow furrowing. "What about you? Aren't you coming with me?"

Ace opened his mouth. His voice thinned out in the wind, barely catchable. "I'm not there anymore, Peter." His long black hair was yanked by the wind, covering his face.

The blood in Peter's veins slowed. He'd just gotten the answer he never wanted. He turned to look back at the graveyard. The outline of that coffin was stretching, growing larger. The silent crowd around it started to blur, to fade. Some irresistible gravitational pull dragged his gaze, forcing him step by step closer, until his eyes inevitably crossed the edge of the coffin and he looked straight down into its depths—

"I can't go with you."

Ace's voice timed it perfectly. Like a blade, it sliced right through that suffocating pull.

Peter jolted back to his senses. He found himself slumped on the grass, drenched in cold sweat like he'd just been yanked out of water, his chest heaving, gulping down air. No coffin. No droning hum. Just the purple sky and the young man standing before him.

"...Where are you going, Ace?"

Peter climbed to his feet, trembling. That grim premonition in his gut had swelled into a mountain, pressing down heavy at the back of his throat. If Peter had spent his whole life following beast-like instincts, then this time—God, please, let his instincts be wrong for once.

"You remember that disaster I mentioned earlier?" Ace slowly lifted his head. The silver glam powder shimmered with an unreal glow under the purple sky. "My people are dying, Peter. Jendellians are supposed to evolve, not rot like this... This planet is withering away. She... she needs me."

Peter shook his head in disbelief, his lashes fluttering uncontrollably. "Then... then what? After you save your goddamn planet, you can come back, right? Jeanette, Monique... they're still waiting outside that hospital room!"

"No, Peter." Ace looked at him, his eyes clear almost to the point of cruelty. "I might not make it back this time."

"WHY?!" Peter completely broke. He lunged forward, his thick fingers clamping onto the sleeve of Ace's leather top, his nails practically digging into the hide. "Tell me what the hell is going on?!"

Ace looked at Peter's face, trying to explain. Fragmented thoughts, like overloaded electrical currents, flickered in those young eyes. But in the end, nothing came out.

"Let's just go back, brother..." Peter tightened his grip on Ace's arm, his voice softening, carrying a plea he didn't even notice himself. "We'll find the best doctors. Look, medical science is so damn advanced these days—"

"You—! You don't get it, Peter..." Ace shoved him away, blurting out, half-embarrassed and half-furious. "I have to go!"

"Then why does it have to be you?! Without you, would Jendell just stop spinning?!"

Ace realized he had zero shot at out-logicking this Earthling. So, just like all those fights in the backstage rehearsal room decades ago, he resorted to pure, bullheaded petulance. "That's all just what YOU think! Have you ever actually thought about what I want?!"

Peter was instantly speechless. He looked at this twenty-something Space Ace, in his absolute prime, then thought back to that sallow, ashen body in the real world, lying at the center of all those tubes. In this near-death world that belonged to Ace, the guy had even been stripped of the right to die of old age.

After a long, agonizing struggle, Peter dropped his hands in defeat, his fists balling against his pant legs. "Then... take me with you."

--

They kept walking. Ace led him through those colorful low-rise houses and finally stopped in front of a towering white pillar-like structure.

"Your... church or something?" Peter craned his neck up, the bones in there voicing their protests once again.

It was a church—more precisely, a pillar-like building, pure white from top to bottom, soaring straight up into the sky. The smooth white exterior had no carvings of any kind, just sheer surface shooting straight toward the heavens.

"I swear I've never seen a church shaped like this in my whole damn life." Peter's neck was getting sore from looking up too long. "How the hell did they even build this thing?"

Ace shook his head and answered, honest as could be. "No idea."

"A church this tall—wouldn't the top of it practically scrape the sky?" Peter squinted his cloudy old eyes. "Don't you guys have ladders or something? What do you see if you go up there?"

"We're not allowed to climb high."

Ace gazed at the massive white tower, a strange kind of reverence seeping into his eyes. "Jendellians have an inborn condition called Jendellusion. The moment we get too high off the ground, our gravity goes haywire, our neurons instantly overload, and then we fall into a permanent coma. It's extremely dangerous."

Peter let out a loud snort, one of his sparse eyebrows shooting up. "Really? Come on, spaceman. Back when we were doing concerts, you were up on that rising platform above the stage doing guitar solos all the damn time. How come you never passed out then?"

Ace finally turned his face toward Peter. The wind lifted his long black hair. His eyes shone bright like nighttime stars.

"Yeah. That was Earth. Different gravity system." He winked at Peter, carrying the slyness of a prank well played. "Besides... on Earth, I found a way to keep myself stable at high altitudes."

Something clicked in Peter's head. He rubbed his forehead in despair. "Goddammit, don't you tell me it's that stuff again..."

"I told you before, alcohol keeps me steady, Peter!" Ace giggled, like a kid who'd finally gotten to show off his secret to a grown-up.

"Bullshit!" Peter hollered, his voice echoing between the white pillars. But somewhere along the way, his tense shoulders had eased up without him noticing.

Eventually, the ruckus died down. That low hum in the air seemed to buzz faintly once again.

Peter clicked his tongue, muttering to himself with something close to resignation. "Alright. Well, at least that explains why you aliens all live in squat little houses."

Ace didn't respond. He slowly lifted his head, gazing up once more at the impossibly tall, stark-white pillar of a church. Against the violet skylight, his profile looked a little thin.

"You know what, Peter?"

"What?"

"I've dreamed about climbing up there just once."

Peter looked at the stardust glinting in the corners of Ace's eyes. "Alright. Even if you somehow lucked out and didn't pass out—say you made it to the top. What would you even do up there?"

Ace gave it some serious thought, then tilted his head. "Dunno. If I didn't fall off, I guess I'd just... check out the view for a while."

Peter sighed and nodded.

"...And then," Ace's voice suddenly dropped real soft, and a sly grin spread across his face as he added, "I'd kick the ladder down. Build my own little kingdom up on that roof, and never come back down! "