Window open in February
This Jeong men's t-shirt carries his portrait printed edge to edge: vintage aviator helmet, shearling jacket, and that look that seems to have been watching you for ten minutes without you noticing. Jeong, Amur leopard, is twenty-one years old and lives in a shared apartment in Barabash, Primorsky Krai, three hours from Vladivostok. The apartment has two rooms, central heating that keeps its own pace, and a window he leaves open even when the thermometer drops below twenty below zero.
His roommate is called Andrei. Park technician, thirty-five, ex-military, quiet. They share a silence that works: they take turns cooking, they share the space without negotiating too much, they respect each other and don't get in the way. Jeong's work table has a disassembled drone, a soldering iron, a multimeter, and topographic maps taped with adhesive. In the kitchen, jars of kimchi fermenting by the window. The grandfather's helmet hangs on the hook by the door, goggles inside.
It's the kind of apartment where every object has a reason, though nobody has explained it. Blackout curtains in the bedroom because Jeong needs total darkness to sleep. The window open because he needs to hear the wind and feel the cold of the forest even at night. The drone on the table because the next day, at a quarter to six, he's heading into the field with the battery inside the sleeping bag and the thermos of coffee between his feet.
