All I could do was smile bitterly at Seo Jihyeok’s reaction, which was exactly what I’d expected. If someone else were going through something like this, and I were hearing about it from a third party’s point of view, I’d probably react in a similar way, though I might be a little more tactful.
Seo Jihyeok whispered to Baek Aeyeong. The space wasn’t that large, so his low voice carried, and I heard everything. Look at his pupils. They’re totally blown. No wonder he looked so worn out. Of course someone who spends his life staring into people’s mouths can’t be sane. I knew it from the moment he stuck a drill in my mouth.
Baek Aeyeong, having heard those rude remarks, smacked Seo Jihyeok on the back with her palm.
“Ow! Ow!”
“You really want to say that to someone who’s unwell?”
Baek Aeyeong looked at me and said, sounding conflicted,
“······Hah. Hang in there.”
“Pardon? What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Just, hang in there.”
“Right.”
“It’s a hard, rough world out there. It’s tough to live through it sober. I understand. I hear there are a lot of good meds these days.”
I didn’t know what she thought she understood, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t that. Baek Aeyeong was taking it one step further. Hahaha. Then······ did that mean Baek Aeyeong was living a life too hard to endure sober? I tried somehow to scoop up my social image as it plummeted toward the floor.
“I’ve never done drugs. And for someone who’s lived the same date three times, I think I’m fairly sane.”
“Not even marijuana?”
“I’ve never tried it.”
When I answered quickly under Seo Jihyeok’s suspicious gaze, more questions came flying.
“Do you happen to like alcohol?”
“I only drink beer, really.”
“One can a minute?”
“······Is that even possible? I drink maybe one can a week, if that.”
Was he asking if my brain had been damaged by alcohol? Were there that many people in this undersea base who drank themselves stupid?
“Is there anything you take regularly? Diet pills, maybe? Pills that improve concentration, or tranquilizers—they can mess up a person’s mind too. Has anyone handed you something weird, saying it’s good for headaches, toothaches, or muscle pain? Or suddenly acted all friendly and recommended some suspicious drink? Weird candy or snacks, even. Or patches you stick on your skin, some unknown perfume, deodorant, things like that. Ah. Right. Hair dye, too.”
At the mention of hair dye, Tumanako’s head snapped up, but perhaps realizing the question hadn’t been directed at him, he shut his mouth and stared intently at me. I did want to dye my hair, though.
“I don’t even take vitamins properly. I don’t think there’s anything in particular······ The sugar-free candies I shared were brought from Korea.”
For questions Seo Jihyeok seemed to be throwing out at random, they were far too specific. And though his attitude was playful, he was clearly waiting for me to answer. No. Don’t tell me.
“Did the things you just asked about actually happen inside the undersea base?”
After thinking for a moment, Seo Jihyeok gave a vague nod.
“Well, I won’t give you any horrifying examples since you’ll get scared. No need to look far—there’s one guy on our team. Kim Jaehee. I don’t know where Jaehee picked up and ate something, but he said a feathered snake was flying around his room telling him, Prepare, prepare, and he got so neurotic he started compulsively stockpiling food in his room. Then he made a fuss about buying parachutes, air tanks, BCD vests, fire extinguishers, simple gas masks, and a Swiss Army knife. He was collecting survivalist supplies like crazy, so I thought he’d suddenly turned into a prepper, but when I talked to him, that wasn’t it either. He’d wake up in the middle of the night babbling that he might die. Then, out of nowhere, he took out three or four life insurance policies.”
What was survivalism? There must be a separate word for it. Wasn’t my life usually survivalism? I didn’t think I’d ever lived under deathism.
“Turns out some Canadian lunatic retired and left him what were supposedly adhesive tattoo stickers as a gift. After he stuck them all down both forearms, every time he wore them, LSD must have been periodically entering through his skin or something, because his mind just went whoosh and he completely lost it.”
“LSD?”
That was a drug, wasn’t it? For a moment I thought I’d misheard, but Seo Jihyeok nodded in confirmation.
“He went around spouting nonsense about how the age of destruction had already arrived or whatever, tap-dancing all the while, and ended up hospitalized for treatment on Daehando. If his luck had been just a little worse, he might have become an addict.”
Was it okay for this kind of danger to be lurking at a workplace? While working, I’d worried about caffeine addiction because I drank so much coffee, but I’d never once worried about drug addiction. People worried about things like carb addiction or sugar addiction.
“Is that person, Jaehee, all right?”
Please say he’s all right. Baek Aeyeong frowned, then answered my question.
“He’s fine now. He was someone who usually went around smiling a lot, you see. The people around him didn’t notice quickly. He already had a few tattoos and piercings, too. We should have thought it was strange that he was smiling too much.”
Even going around smiling could be a warning sign. Was there nothing in this undersea base that was a little less dangerous? It felt like ordinary people like me shouldn’t be here at all. Suddenly, I recalled one of the rooms belonging to the people on Engineer Team A.
“So the room piled full of food must be his.”
Was that Room 27, or Room 28? It had been like a food storage room.
“He still hasn’t finished eating everything he bought back then. Good thing it’s sterilized food. Did that damn parachute sell?”
Seo Jihyeok thought for a moment at Baek Aeyeong’s question, then shook his head.
“I don’t think anyone’s bought it yet.”
“There’s a flea market once a month on Daehando, where everyone sells things they don’t need. Jaehee keeps putting out the gas mask and all that to sell, but no one buys them.”
Who would buy a parachute or a gas mask here? Maybe because it was an island, packages and cargo seemed to take quite a while to come and go, so if you bought something wrong once, returning it would be difficult too. Seo Jihyeok picked the thread of the conversation back up from somewhere.
“Anyway, this is a place where you have to be careful to keep your sanity. To begin with, there are a few parts of your story that don’t make sense, Doctor.”
“Which parts did you find strange?”
Seo Jihyeok thought for a moment after hearing my question, then said,
“I injured my leg, and these two didn’t abandon me?”
Baek Aeyeong smiled as if amused and said to Seo Jihyeok,
“They said you got shot~ They said you got shot~ They said you were an idiot~ They said you were an idiot~ We’d have already thrown you into a corner about a hundred times and run away fast.”
“Waaah. That’s so mean. ······Well, let’s say that part is true. A diamond bigger than a person’s fist? Come on. It must have been zircon. What kind of diamond is that big? And where in the undersea base are there more than four thousand stairs?”
“There are.”
The answer came from Sin Haeryang, who had been quietly listening. Seo Jihyeok was surprised and asked Team Leader Sin,
“Huh? There are stairs like that?”
“I heard that until the Third Undersea Base was built, they worked by making temporary stairs as they went.”
“They’re not even on the blueprints.”
“I don’t know that much. ······Did you visit the Second Undersea Base exhibition hall yesterday?”
“I went with Jihyeon and repaired the lighting and a few severed lines. There wasn’t anything much inside. Just a few lumps of stone? It didn’t even take an hour to fix.”
“I see.”
And Sin Haeryang said nothing more. Even though asking about things like this probably wouldn’t do me any good, I couldn’t help but ask. If I didn’t ask, it seemed like the other party would never express his opinion. It was good that he was tight-lipped, but not knowing what he was thinking made me horribly uneasy. If I’d been on this man’s team, I thought I would have been pretty frustrated.
“What do you think, Mr. Sin Haeryang?”
“About what?”
“My story.”
Sin Haeryang looked at me silently, then said,
“I don’t think it’s a lie.”
“Is that so.”
Oh! He thought the things I’d said weren’t lies! Of the four people who had just heard the same story, one seemed to think I was an addict, and another seemed to think I was mentally ill.
A sparkling rush of joy swelled in my heart and passed for a moment. Then silence fell. Sin Haeryang said nothing more. He’d said it wasn’t a lie, but it didn’t seem to mean he would trust me or believe me. Should I be grateful enough that his attitude wasn’t Don’t bullshit me?
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“Could you explain a bit more at length?”
“······The only people who can ask me for explanations or anything else are my team members. Or someone I owe a debt to.”
Had the Sin Haeryang from that time had any reason to owe me? I’d asked all sorts of stupid questions and, being a coward, had gone around trembling in fear. If anything, the people with me had probably suffered quite a bit acting as my guides and babysitters.
“I don’t think there was anything for you to owe me for, Mr. Haeryang.”
“According to what you said, Mr. Muhyeon, you helped Jihyeok up the stairs without receiving anything in return.”
“Well. That was something I obviously had to do in order to get out.”
“······Mr. Muhyeon, you told me the information you believe to be true, as it is, without lying. But judging by the current situation, there are quite a few parts that don’t match with what happened before, and we don’t have enough time to verify each one or determine what is true.”
“Ah. Yes. I see.”
“I won’t rely on the story you told me, but I won’t ignore it either.”
Maybe because I hadn’t expected Sin Haeryang to listen to me this much, I was a little surprised. Seo Jihyeok and Baek Aeyeong seemed to be the ones showing the most realistic reactions. Was it because he was an agnostic?
Tumanako, who had been listening to the conversation while rolling a candy around in his mouth, was tapping the candy against his teeth. It looked like he was testing its hardness with his teeth. I wanted to stop him, since it was a bad habit for his teeth, but perhaps because his tears had dried, tear tracks were visible around his eyes, so I held my tongue. Seeming to have shaken off a little of his gloom by focusing on something else, Tumanako said to me,
“What you’re saying sounds kind of like a myth from our side.”
“What kind of story is it?”
Was it something about escaping a situation like this? Or something about being able to run away? ······This was the problem. When a desperate situation came, I found myself trying to lean even on old stories like myths.
“They say that originally, the sun moved much faster than it does now. It moved incredibly fast. During the time the sun was up, people couldn’t finish all their work because the sun crossed the sky and left too quickly.”
As he said this, Tumanako drew an arc with his long finger and moved it quickly to the side, as if the sun were traveling.
“So there’s a Māori myth about trapping the sun to slow it down and give the world more time. Hearing your story made me think of that.”
Tumanako’s finger moved slowly. With a crunch, Tumanako’s teeth shattered the candy.