Sssup. I inhaled, then exhaled until my lungs felt like they were shriveling. Hoooooo. Every time I swallowed a breath, thoughts came to me—right now I must be breathing air compressed to an insane degree, shouldn’t I not be letting this kind of air into my lungs, shouldn’t I be holding my breath? Breathing felt frightening and repulsive. They said the more you breathed, the more likely you were to get sick, so why did I have to breathe?
If I held my breath and my lungs burst, what would happen? Pneumothorax? Pulmonary hemorrhage? I imagined my alveoli popping one after another, spraying bloody foam, then stopped because it seemed bad for my mental health. I tried to remind myself only of the fact that I had to keep inhaling and exhaling without stopping.
It’s fine. There’s a way to treat decompression sickness. Seo Jihyeok had once said there were decompression chambers at the First Undersea Base and at the Daehando hospital.
A hyperbaric oxygen chamber was a treatment method where they put a person inside a cylinder and forcibly pumped oxygen into their body to drive out nitrogen. Seeing as there were two such decompression chambers prepared, it seemed there must have been quite a few people who got decompression sickness while diving, given the nature of an undersea base.
“……Jaehee. How are we supposed to deal with it if we get decompression sickness?”
“We have to take them somewhere with a hyperbaric chamber.”
Kim Jaehee answered simply. As I kept breathing diligently, it occurred to me that the seawater touching my body was far too cold. My body trembled. Was I going to freeze to death before we got out?
As the water rose a little higher, it must have gone past 190 centimeters, because Shin Haeryang lightly jumped. Then he pressed the wall beside the ceiling, pulled out a makeshift handle, and held on with one hand. Kim Jaehee likewise held on with one hand to a handle. ……How were people without muscle supposed to survive? Neither I, gripping a ladder rung with both hands, nor the engineers holding on to the handles in the wall said anything to each other.
As the water quietly rose, everyone only stared at the water level. I tried hard to make my voice sound bright as I asked,
“If the hatch handle changes color and we can get out, who leaves the submersible first?”
Shin Haeryang, who had been silent, answered me.
“The hatch is fairly heavy.”
Then he looked at Kim Jaehee and said,
“Jaehee. You open the door and go out first.”
Kim Jaehee asked Shin Haeryang,
“Who goes out last?”
“I’ll go out last.”
Then it would be Kim Jaehee, me, then Shin Haeryang. We’d be leaving in the reverse order of how we came in.
“I’d like to change the order. I want to go out last. Switch places with me, Team Leader.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to look good in front of Muhyeon.”
How did being the last one to leave the submersible make him look good in front of me?
“Is the order we leave the submersible important?”
“It’s not especially important.”
When Shin Haeryang answered as if it were nothing, Kim Jaehee instead looked at me and opened his mouth.
“The longer a person remains in this submersible breathing compressed air, the higher the chance they’ll get decompression sickness. People who escape quickly suffer less from decompression sickness, and the person who leaves last has a higher chance of developing a severe case.”
“What? Ah…… I see.”
Right. I hadn’t thought of that. I looked at the person who had answered that it wasn’t especially important and asked,
“Team Leader Shin, why were you trying to go last?”
“……There are only three people in this submersible. Jaehee isn’t wrong, but that only makes a meaningful difference when there are ten or more passengers and a lot of time is consumed. The time it takes for just three people to escape probably won’t make much difference in whether decompression sickness develops.”
True, how much of a time difference could there be when three people left a submersible? I accepted Shin Haeryang’s explanation. Then I asked the cult believer,
“Jaehee, why do you want to go last?”
“Because I want to plant a sense of indebtedness or guilt in the Savior’s heart. Or at least show you my spirit of sacrifice.”
“……As the Team Leader said, Jaehee, you go out first.”
The moment I said that, I felt the impact of the submersible slamming hard into something. My hands slipped from the ladder rungs, and I fell straight into the seawater. My feet didn’t touch the floor, so I flailed around wildly, and then someone grabbed the back of my collar and yanked me upward. As I thrashed my arms and legs in panic, Shin Haeryang’s voice came from above.
“Stretch both arms long toward the sky. Then your hands should reach the ladder. Hold on the way you were holding on before.”
After swallowing seawater twice, my head was a mess. The moment I grabbed the ladder rungs again, I spat water out frantically and gasped for breath, and then I saw Kim Jaehee. Maybe he had hit his head on the ceiling, because blood was flowing from his head again.
“Jaehee. Your head?”
“I’m fine. The place I hit before just split open again.”
“Haeryang?”
“I’m fine.”
Good thing I was the only leaky bucket. The other guys were at least mostly all right. The salty taste filling my mouth made me feel like vomiting, but I held it in and focused only on breathing.
Unlike at first, when water had poured explosively into the submersible, the water level now rose very slowly. Avoiding the water, I climbed several rungs up the ladder, and only when all three of our heads were nearly touching the ceiling did the water stop following us. My whole body felt like it hurt, but I couldn’t tell whether that was because today had been so exhausting or because of decompression sickness. Looking at the water, which had stopped rising and now lay submerged in silence, Shin Haeryang said,
“When pressure equilibrium is reached, the color of the hatch handle will change.”
All three of us lifted our heads and stared only at the hatch handle. It felt like waiting for a traffic light when you had no idea when it would change. ……I really hate waiting. I stared at the handle anxiously until I felt like my insides were melting, and at last the color of the hatch handle changed from red to green. Ding! With a small sound, the handle turned green, and I was so moved I wanted to dance.
“I’ll go out first.”
Kim Jaehee climbed by gripping the ladder rungs with his hands, almost using only the strength of his arms, and from the very top of the ladder, he turned the hatch handle open. The hatch must have been considerably heavy, because Kim Jaehee practically shoved it open with his shoulder and back, then gasped hard for breath before leaving the submersible first.
A gust of wind swept in through the open submersible hatch. From outside the submersible, Kim Jaehee reached a hand out to me. I climbed the ladder one rung at a time, and every piece of clothing I was wearing sagged like a water ghost, seeming to cling to me in order to drag me back into the submersible. My body was heavy, as if I had been wrung dry. When I finally climbed up and grabbed Kim Jaehee’s hand, he pulled me with all his strength. The moment I breathed air at atmospheric pressure, the feeling that this place was safe surged over me. The tension drained from my body.
As I clung to the top of the submersible, exhausted, and looked around, I saw people lying face down or collapsed on the floor. Looking through a blurry gaze with water wetting my face, I saw that some of the fallen people weren’t moving at all. Were those people dead? I put my upper body into the hatch so Shin Haeryang could come out, grabbed the forearm of the person climbing up, and pulled.
The submersible we had been in had knocked over three unmanned submersibles and stopped as if it had risen up right there. It was probably the impact from knocking those unmanned submersibles down that had made me fall into the water.
It took another thirty minutes after escaping the submersible for all three of our feet to touch the submersible port. The submerged Shim Cheong 7 slowly descended, and even the hatch sank below the water and disappeared into the seawater. In my heart, I thanked the vanishing Shim Cheong 7.
All we had done was get out of the submersible, but it had used up all my strength. I was dizzy, unable to stand properly, and a throbbing headache washed over me. Every joint in my body hurt, but I couldn’t tell whether it was because I had just gone into the water and come back out, or whether this was decompression sickness. Maybe because I had been in cold water for so long, my skin had no sensation. As time passed, my arms and legs grew itchy, and it felt like the kind of itch you got when you came out after showering in hot water in winter and your dry skin cracked.
Kim Jaehee, beside me, coughed and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, so I looked at him and saw that he had a nosebleed. Kim Jaehee blinked hard several times, then tried to rub his eyes with the back of his hand, which was a mess with blood from his nose. When I grabbed that hand and stopped him, Kim Jaehee said in a trembling voice,
“Savior. I can’t see properly.”
His voice sounded far too quiet. As if water had gotten into my ears, Kim Jaehee’s words seemed to come from very far away.
“Don’t rub your eyes with your hands.”
“I can’t see well. Please help me.”
“You can’t rub your eyes with your hands. Stay still like that. I’ll look.”
I held Kim Jaehee’s head and checked both his eyes, but it didn’t look like anything had gotten in them or scratched them. After barely stopping Kim Jaehee, I looked to the side and saw that Shin Haeryang seemed to be in even worse condition. Kim Jaehee could at least stand straight, but Shin Haeryang seemed unable to stand properly; he remained on one knee, both hands braced against the floor, unable to get up.
“Haeryang? What part of you is unwell? Team Leader Shin?”
Only when I got close enough to put a hand on Shin Haeryang’s shoulder did I see faint blood near his ear. Shin Haeryang shouted twice in my direction.
“I have a headache and…… visual field loss, hearing loss, gait disturbance, and dizziness.”
Shin Haeryang’s voice was so quiet I could hardly hear him. Suddenly, I wondered whether it wasn’t that Shin Haeryang’s voice was quiet, but that my ears were bad. As I checked Kim Jaehee and Shin Haeryang’s conditions, it seemed my own vision was blurry too. With my artificial left eye, the world looked normal, but when I looked at the world with my actual right eye, I had double vision, and objects appeared two at a time. ……This is driving me insane.
There wasn’t a single place on my body that didn’t hurt, but I could endure it enough to walk. I stood in the middle and supported Shin Haeryang and Kim Jaehee on either side. I wanted to collapse onto any patch of floor at once, but there were two people in worse condition than me, so I couldn’t. The floor of this submersible port was surely colder than ice. Half out of my mind, I supported the two of them and took them to the lounge.
Hot air rushed over us the moment I opened the door. Since we had been pickled in seawater of one or two degrees until just moments ago, I was so grateful for the warmth inside the lounge that I nearly cried. First, we needed to get out of hypothermia.
I sat the two of them on a sofa and quickly checked inside the lounge. One person who looked like an engineer had collapsed right next to the sink. Seeing him in a puddle soaked with blood, he seemed dead. I didn’t even have time to be afraid. While I was gathering the coats, cardigans, and dry towels hanging inside the lounge, Shin Haeryang must have smelled the blood; though he couldn’t even see properly, he rose from the sofa and looked around.
“Did someone die?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did they die?”
“I don’t know.”
“The person who killed him may be hiding nearby.”
I covered Shin Haeryang’s head with a towel as he got up by holding on to the sofa and said,
“They might be. If they come close, I’ll try hard to chase them off. For now, wipe off the water first.”
Kim Jaehee took the towel I handed him and first pressed it against his nose. It didn’t look like he had rubbed his eyes with his hand without me noticing, since there was no nosebleed around his eyes. While wiping my face and hair roughly with a towel, I checked my body. My arms and legs, which had felt itchy, weren’t scratched, nor were there insects crawling around; instead, several spots had appeared and they were swollen. After hearing our combined symptoms, Shin Haeryang buried his head in a towel and said in a louder voice than usual,
“These are typical symptoms of decompression sickness.”
“The constantly wanting to lie down, not wanting to do anything, the exhaustion all over, and my arms, legs, shoulders, and knees all hurting too?”
“Yes. That is also decompression sickness.”
I’d thought that was an illness I’d gotten from being an office worker, but apparently not. The people working at the Second Undersea Base seemed to prefer tea to coffee, because there was a pot of pale yellow tea brewed, so I put half a cup of tea into each of Kim Jaehee’s and Shin Haeryang’s hands.
Maybe because everyone was in poor condition, there was no joy anywhere over having successfully escaped the submersible and survived. My hearing and vision, as well as Shin Haeryang’s and Kim Jaehee’s, were all bad, and it seemed problems had arisen because our sinuses had been damaged by the pressure. Muscle pain, extreme fatigue, and dizziness came as a bonus. What was truly fortunate was that no one had chest pain or difficulty breathing.