Is it just me? When I suddenly run into a patient I saw at the hospital somewhere other than the hospital, there isn’t much to talk about. You end up saying things like, “It’s been a while. You’ve been brushing your teeth properly, right?” and turning into Big Brother, as if you’re monitoring the patient’s teeth, or into an awkward, uncomfortable nag. So when I meet patients outside, I usually ask about things that won’t feel too burdensome, like the weather that day or whether they’ve eaten.
I understood Shin Haeryang’s warning not to talk to Tamaki or draw his attention. One thing I’d learned while living at the undersea base was that drawing the attention of someone armed with a gun didn’t really get you anything except shot.
Even knowing that, the reason I went out of my way to speak was because it seemed like no one here was saying what Tamaki wanted to hear. Everyone seemed desperate to get out of this escape craft port somehow, leaving Tamaki and the three corpses behind. I understood how they felt. Seeing people whose faces I knew shot dead scared me, too.
The truth was, I didn’t have much I could say to Tamaki either. Everything I could say to a patient I’d met for treatment, I had already said at the dental clinic.
If that lunatic Sato hadn’t spouted bullshit like “I want to leave too,” and had instead immediately dropped to his knees and started begging for forgiveness, I wouldn’t have had to talk to Tamaki like this. I would have clammed up like an oyster and stayed buried in a corner. But that bastard was pouring gasoline onto a campfire. I might not be able to put the fire out, but I could at least draw attention and move the gasoline aside.
For everyone else, today was probably one strange day in a leaking undersea base, but maybe because I had already repeated this same day too many times, ordinary weekdays felt impossibly far away.
It was practically the same as me not having worked these past few days, yet somehow it felt like I hadn’t rested for even five minutes. Treating Tamaki felt like something from ages ago, too. To Tamaki, it would actually feel like two or three days had passed since visiting the dental clinic.
About a minute passed with my eyes meeting Tamaki’s after I asked how he was. Tamaki lowered his gaze and said something in Japanese.
“It’s still uncomfortable.”
Shin Haeryang quickly interpreted beside me. It looked like Shin Haeryang planned to hide the team members behind the mining robot if Tamaki aimed the muzzle this way. In fact, Kim Jaehee, Baek Aeyoung, and Jeong Sanghyeon were moving very slightly—so slightly it was almost unnoticeable—toward the side of the mining robot.
Not having the translator was so inconvenient I felt like I was going insane. It felt like I’d gone deaf.
“Did you eat the candy?”
“...Not yet.”
“Before I came to the undersea base, sugar-free candies were pretty popular with the kids. If a dentist gives it to them, their parents don’t tell them not to eat it. Some kids would even ask me not to treat them and just give them a handful of candy behind their mom’s back. Or some would ask if I could stock up on chocolate instead. Cunning, right? ...But once I started giving them out to adults, the adults liked them even more than the kids did.”
Children don’t know how frightening things like high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, or dermatitis can be. Ignorance of fear makes people brave. But there were plenty of brave adults, too.
All the snacks at the undersea base were either American or Canadian, and they were too sweet for my taste. Watching the mining team people finish dental treatment for cavities and tooth fractures, then go off chewing on chocolate brownie chips so sweet they made your tongue sting, as if they were chewing cud, I felt the recklessness of adulthood.
“The discomfort should get better around next weekend.”
Unless something unusual happened, stomatitis healed in about ten days. The inside of the mouth was one of the fastest-healing parts of the body. Oral mucosal cells had a high metabolic turnover rate, wounds were kept moist, and the components in saliva accelerated the healing process.
That was why, even if you burned your lips or the inside of your mouth on hot soup, you forgot about it after only a few days. It was a place that was constantly getting wounded, yet healed quickly. Tamaki answered me.
“I won’t be alive until next week.”
I had the urge to ask Shin Haeryang if he was really interpreting properly. At the same time, the tension I’d felt from the moment I saw Tamaki holding a gun began to make sense. Would the voices of others saying they wanted to leave really reach the ears of someone who was not desperate to escape in order to survive? It seemed like Tamaki wouldn’t care whether everyone here died or not.
“You’re not going to leave the undersea base?”
“I have no intention of leaving the undersea base. And my team won’t be leaving this place either.”
As soon as he heard that, Takahashi shouted something at Tamaki. Shin Haeryang frowned but didn’t interpret it for me, and when I turned my head to the side, my eyes met Kim Jaehee’s.
“He’s saying, why should he be unable to leave because of you, and if you want to die, die by yourself.”
Sato had probably been stopping Takahashi and Yamashita from saying anything to Tamaki. Starting with that remark from Takahashi, even Yamashita got angry and began huffing as he shouted something loudly at Tamaki.
Kim Jaehee listened to Yamashita’s words and snickered, but he didn’t interpret them for me. Yamashita was waving his fists around in the air and shouting at Tamaki in an angry voice, and Shin Haeryang, who was listening, shook his head slightly.
“What on earth is that man saying?”
“He says Tamaki is pointing a gun because he doesn’t think he can win in a fistfight. He’s telling him to put the gun down and fight fair with fists.”
Baek Aeyoung pressed a handkerchief into Jeong Sanghyeon’s hand, whispered that she would kill him if he opened his mouth one more time, and then said to Shin Haeryang,
“Is he an idiot? Just how little do you have to see someone as a person to say that to someone holding a gun?”
Shin Haeryang must have decided Yamashita’s Japanese ranting wasn’t bullshit valuable enough to bother interpreting, because he stopped translating after that.
Yamashita’s angry voice continued on afterward. But the more Yamashita spoke, the more the engineers on the American team began to keep their mouths shut. Even after three minutes, Yamashita still wasn’t done talking, and unable to bear my curiosity any longer, I asked Shin Haeryang. With his brow furrowed, Shin Haeryang interpreted what Yamashita was currently spewing.
“He’s saying, ‘If you didn’t want to work, you should’ve said you didn’t want to! You said you could work hard! How can you say you’ll work hard and then change your tune before even eight months have passed and say you can’t? We let you do every job you wanted!’ This is my personal opinion, but I think we could record this and report it to the labor office.”
It seemed Tamaki had chosen to shoot his own team dead instead of filing a report and going through the complicated verification process afterward.
Tamaki, who hadn’t answered a single word to the team members shouting at him, silently fired a warning shot at the floor where Engineering Team Na stood. Yamashita’s mouth snapped shut at once. Tamaki spoke weakly.
“I don’t even want to talk to you people. I just want all of you to die horribly.”
His voice came out low and cracked, utterly sick of the harassment from his coworkers. Tamaki looked at the people in the escape craft port with eyes that had given up on all hope in the world.
“I hope you suffer forever in this undersea base.”
Shin Haeryang interpreted as calmly as possible, but hearing Tamaki’s words gave me a slight chill. ...Tamaki wouldn’t remember, but it was already coming true just as he wanted. As far as I knew, not a single person from Engineering Team Na had escaped Undersea Base No. 4.
Even if they died now, they would come back to life and wake up in this dark sea again, just like before. Believing they could survive because an escape craft had been prepared, they would freely shoot and kill the people they met, then arrive at Hyeonmudong, die beneath the sea because of Tamaki’s betrayal, and wake up again.
How much revenge did you have to take for it to count as revenge?
Would once not do? Did you have to bring the other person back to life and kill them about five times for it to feel like proper revenge?
How long was forever? Someone said living infinitely was impossible. Even the Earth had a lifespan. Was it Yugeum?
“Mr. Tamaki. I’m planning to resign from this undersea base.”
It felt like everyone in the escape craft port was looking at me. The only dentist in this undersea base had just declared that he was quitting his post.
“What I felt while staying here for five days is that living in the undersea base is harder than I expected. I’m in a specialized position, so I work alone, and even then, I thought I couldn’t possibly keep working here. I think there are probably certain kinds of people who are suited to working in a place like this.”
You would probably have to be someone who liked daily stimulation and thrills, someone self-centered enough not to be easily swayed by other people’s pain or words, and someone with firm convictions of your own in order to survive. And you’d probably have to be someone wearing about twenty kilograms of muscle like clothing and whose morality had hit rock bottom to live well here.
I was only grumbling about it now, but honestly, believing that a dental clinic would run properly when you planted a single dentist in a clinic with nothing in it was basically telling me to resign, wasn’t it? There should have been at least two more people. It was a good thing treatment here was free. If I’d also had to handle reception and payment, which were administrative duties, I might have grabbed the helicopter again the moment I got off at the helipad.
Huh? Now that I think about it, that might actually have been better.
“Am I unable to endure it because I’m the weakest and have the least grit in this undersea base? Or is everyone else putting up with it and working, and I’m the only strange one? I thought about it many times, but... I can’t reach a good conclusion. But I do know that the undersea base and I don’t really suit each other.”
Doing dental work itself wasn’t a big problem. The reason I wanted to quit this place wasn’t because of the work.
“The work is fine. It’s not that I hate this job. It’s not that the work doesn’t suit me. But everything other than the work makes it impossible for me to endure this place. I’ve only been here five days, and yet I’m already desperate to resign, so I don’t know how everyone else endures it. I don’t really know how you lived in this undersea base, Mr. Tamaki. But if, by any chance, you dislike the undersea base or the people in it.”
I hesitated, then asked Tamaki.
“Would you like to resign from here with me?”
Now that I’d said it out loud, it sounded incredibly irresponsible. My own path ahead was still impossibly long right now. But it was better than continuing to die in this undersea base.
“I can’t find you a new workplace or anything like that, but I can buy you a few cups of coffee as someone to talk to.”