Sumire deftly ran her hands over the dog’s body, then parted its half-open eyelids. She squeezed ointment over the milky-white, blinded eye, gently closed the lids, and rubbed them. Despite her tremendously long fingernails, there was not the slightest hesitation in that series of motions. She was as accustomed to them as washing her face or brushing her teeth, as if they were simply part of her daily routine.
……There were so many unusual tanks in the undersea base that I’d assumed it was a tank the moment I saw it, but was that thing in the corner an animal hyperbaric oxygen chamber? I looked around the room to see if there was some kind of bag that could be used to move the dog, but I didn’t find anything suitable. Could we put the dog in that shopping-basket-like carrier and take it with us? That paper bag was too small.
As though there was nothing to hurry about, Sumire slowly stroked the dog’s head with her palm. The dog, too, lay still, breathing roughly; I couldn’t tell whether it couldn’t move or whether dogs simply lay like that. It felt as though time was growing slower and slower only in this place. As time passed, I was the only one growing frantic, my insides burning.
“The undersea base might collapse.”
“Lower your voice.”
Had I spoken too loudly? Sumire’s voice was quiet. When she spoke to other people, she acted like an ill-tempered lion, but here, it felt as though Sumire was adjusting everything she had to that dog. The noise, the time, even the air seemed to be holding its breath.
Only the occasional distant sound of the entire undersea base rumbling and trembling uneasily reached us. I looked at the dog, like a lump of fur whose chest alone was rising and falling, then spoke in a whisper.
“Can’t we put the dog in a bag and carry it?”
I had already once stuffed a cat and a snake into whatever bags I could get my hands on and transported them three kilometers. Even I knew it wasn’t an ordinary method of transport, but maybe it would work for that dog too. That dog looked lighter than the cat.
If I carried Sumire on my back, and Sumire carried the dog, couldn’t we more or less make it? Of course, it would be hard as hell. But we wouldn’t know unless we tried. Sumire, shivering lightly from the cold, carefully covered the dog’s body with a thin blanket and said,
“Choco can’t endure that kind of stress.”
Then how had she brought it into the undersea base? Perhaps guessing what I was wondering, Sumire said,
“We came by boat after putting her to sleep with medicine. With the thought that if she didn’t open her eyes again, I would bury her here.”
If a dog was thirty years old, was that a lot or not?
I had only vaguely heard that animals living on the streets died within three or four years. I had once skimmed a newspaper article saying that pets’ life expectancy had increased due to improvements in living conditions, nutrition, and advances in veterinary medicine, but since we didn’t keep animals at home, I hadn’t been interested. Until twenty years ago, there had been two patients in our house, including me and my mother. And even now, keeping an animal itself was a luxury.
If I had known I would meet cats, dogs, and snakes in this sort of way, I would have read at least one book like an encyclopedia of pets. Wondering if someone who seemed utterly uninterested in either escape or survival had any ties left on land, I asked,
“Ms. Sumire. What about your family?”
“This child is all I have.”
“I mean your family in Japan.”
“This child is all I have.”
“Don’t you have any friends or people you were close to in Japan?”
“This child is all I have.”
Sumire looked at the dog and did not even glance my way. Judging by the way she answered, she seemed less like a human and more like an android with a recorded voice. It was as though she had let only one pet into her life and separated everything else from it. A life in which the only thing of value was a single dog.
The fact that the undersea base had been occupied by the Infinite Church, that torpedoes had smashed the research center, that water had risen in the White Tiger Wing and Vermilion Bird Wing, and that the life-support system in the Azure Dragon Wing had broken down did not seem to matter to this person in the slightest. Sumire did not even seem very interested in her own body. If anything, I was the one worried about the state of Sumire’s leg, so I said a word.
“Your leg must hurt. At least take some painkillers.”
At that, Sumire, who had been sitting on the bed caring for the dog, reached out and opened a drawer in the corner. From a drawer packed with syringes and pills, she took out one white tablet that seemed to be acetaminophen. Then she poured water from a bottle into a cup and swallowed the pill with it.
“Is there no one in the undersea base you became close to or liked? Or any team members you’re close to?”
I asked because I thought of the friendship between Baek Aeyoung and Shuran, but perhaps it was a question she did not like, because Sumire gave no answer. In the silence, Sumire, whose hand had been quietly rubbing the dog’s forehead, suddenly laughed. Then she said to me in a low voice,
“That was the first time I saw him speak so politely.”
“Who?”
“Team Leader Sato Ryusuke.”
“What is his usual way of speaking like?”
He had been polite to me when I came to Deep Blue. Had only my translator made him polite to me? No, that couldn’t be it. Even if my translator was an old model, it could at least distinguish between honorific and casual speech. When I tried to recall the speech and attitudes of the other team leaders, only Vladimir, Shin Haeryang, and Jennifer came to mind. Of those, the first two were the ones I had seen together with their team members, but if I considered their behavior the average, then I could only think of the undersea base as a den of demons for engineers. In an unmotivated tone, along with a yawn, Sumire answered me.
“He’s never once been like that to a team member. ……Takahashi should have seen that.”
“You asked me about Tamaki’s medical records, didn’t you? Weren’t you concerned?”
“I only asked because Team Leader Sato told me to. Everything written on the pad gets saved. He probably didn’t want a record left. I don’t care what Sato does, who Yamashita uses as a punching bag, who Suzuki feeds needles to, or who Ichita uses a knife on. I tell them to do whatever they want.”
Then Sumire breathed a small exhale onto the tip of the dog’s ear, sprayed water onto a cloth, and simply washed the dog’s face. When she realized I was watching her hands, Sumire said one thing.
“This child is the only one I trust.”
“……Was it so hard to care for people even a quarter of half as much as you care for a dog?”
It wasn’t as if I had only met crazy people in the undersea base. There had been decent people too. Sumire did not seem to think so.
“I wish they’d all torment each other and die. There are ten billion of them, aren’t there?”
I hadn’t lived a long life, but I hadn’t lived a short one either, and yet this was the first time I had met someone like this. ……No. Now that I thought about it, including the people I had met in the undersea base, not a single person I had met had been exactly the same as another.
In ordinary life, there were rarely occasions to dig this deeply into someone else’s life story or circumstances. Among the people I had met, had there been anyone even slightly like Sumire? They said a tendency to make light of human life was widespread throughout society, but I hadn’t expected to encounter it in this form in the middle of a disaster.
I didn’t know what to say. I had never thought I lacked social experience. Why was it that, after coming to the undersea base, I kept finding myself at a loss for words? ……Then again, if misanthropy could be pulled out and the will to live planted with just a few words, someone would already have done that for Sumire. And if she had had any intention of that, Sumire would have taken the hand that person extended. I decided to clumsily offer at least a finger. I didn’t particularly think my action was for Sumire’s sake.
“Ms. Sumire, you liked Mr. Shin Haeryang, didn’t you? How about contacting him after you get out of here?”
Shin Haeryang didn’t seem interested in Sumire, but Sumire seemed at least a little interested, so I threw out the bait. After saying it, I felt as though I were coaxing a child who refused to enter the treatment room with a doll or a piece of candy.
“……When the helicopter fell into the sea, everyone was busy getting out first. He was the one who cut my broken belt and saved me.”
The thought crossed my mind that Shin Haeryang had been the main culprit who made that helicopter fall, and that when he tried to soak the helicopter carrying Engineer Na’s team in seawater, he had aimed only for the electronics, so maybe he had been trying to make sure no one died. Rather than reveal that, I simply closed my mouth with a sigh.
“I thought that because he helped me, he’d want something in return, but there was nothing like that.”
“……Is compensation mandatory here if someone helps you?”
Sumire looked at me as though I was making her state the obvious. So I wondered if I had made some strange remark based on mistaken common sense.
Compensation was mandatory? As people went through life, they could just help each other. Did they really have to put a price on that action? Why were the people here so razor-sharp? Did living under the sea make them turn this cold?
Sumire, sitting on the bed while caring for the dog, looked at me for a few seconds and asked,
“Is there something you want?”
There were many things I wanted. First, I needed at least about five hundred functioning escape vessels, and a way to eliminate the strange phenomenon of time going back into the past, or an efficient method to put the fanatics called the Infinite Church into prisons all over the world, or something that would let me report to Korea that someone needed to save me.
“My head suddenly hurts too. Give me one of those painkillers.”
Sumire opened the drawer again and handed me the entire bottle of the pills she had taken. Rubbing the pill bottle with my hand, I made one final suggestion to Sumire. This was the only sort of ability I had.
“If we escape from here and get outside, I’ll learn veterinary dentistry from a vet and treat Choco’s teeth in secret, if I have to. If my skills aren’t enough, I’ll at least apply fluoride to her teeth. Even so, won’t you consider leaving together?”
“I’m going to stay here.”
I had neither the ability to take along someone who said she wouldn’t go, nor the power to change her mind. I desperately wanted to put the dog into the carrier, put Sumire in there with it, push them around, and load them onto an escape vessel that seemed to have dropped from the sky, then send them to land. It was fine for now, but we didn’t know when water might fill the Azure Dragon Wing. She might regret it then. With a soundless sigh, I pressed that feeling down, again and again.
Sumire was now lying peacefully on her own bed, looking at the dog. My existence felt like an impurity in this room. I was about to leave the room in disappointment when a thought suddenly occurred to me, and I asked one last question.
“You hated even talking to the others, so why do you answer my questions properly?”
“In this undersea base, Doctor, you were the kindest.”
Was I? ……I didn’t remember. I treated everyone who came to the hospital similarly. I probably hadn’t treated Sumire especially better or worse. Sumire’s answer made me feel even more conflicted.
“There are plenty of people in the world better than me.”
Sumire said nothing. When I came out, the door to that room closed without a sound.