The lounge was quiet while my hands, numb from being curled up in the cold, finally loosened somewhat and warmth returned to my body. It was so quiet it was almost unsettling. Shin Haeryang was naturally not much of a talker, so that was one thing, but Kim Jaehee wasn’t saying anything either. Only after emptying about three more cups of tea did Kim Jaehee lift his bowed head. He lowered the towel he had been pressing to his nose and forehead, then spoke slowly.
“What are you planning to do now?”
Kim Jaehee’s voice sounded like a whisper, but that was probably because my ears were bad. For now, shouldn’t we take you two and get out through the submersible port? But that didn’t seem to be what Kim Jaehee was asking, so I stated today’s ultimate goal.
“Uh… I heard there’s a decompression chamber at the First Undersea Base or on Daehan-do. Since I and both of you have symptoms of decompression sickness, we should head for Daehan-do.”
Kim Jaehee turned his head toward Shin Haeryang and asked,
“What about you, Team Leader?”
“My goal is to slip out of here quietly and rendezvous with the team members on Daehan-do.”
“So both of you intend to keep going despite your physical condition being so poor.”
“We can’t just sit here doing nothing. …The longer we remain inside the undersea base, the less I know what the escaped team members might do in the name of rescuing me or you.”
Kim Jaehee rubbed the bloodstained towel beneath his nose, sniffling as he began to speak.
“There will probably be quite a lot of Infinite Church believers stationed in the central plaza beyond the submersible port corridor. The believers armed with guns are all people who each have something they desperately want. You might get lucky and take down one or two of them, but you can’t fight everyone stationed in the central plaza and win. Do you have any plan for that?”
I am an ordinary Korean. Do you think I ever expected, in all my life, to end up in a situation where I’d have to face multiple gunmen barehanded? Shin Haeryang did not answer Kim Jaehee’s question. Kim Jaehee seemed to be speaking in quite a loud voice, but to my ears it sounded like a mosquito buzzing, and the more I focused, the more my head hurt. I dried my hair with the towel, then draped it around my neck and answered.
“No.”
“We’ll be caught. Even if we successfully escape the undersea base, we may have to live with aftereffects for the rest of our lives.”
Kim Jaehee looked toward me, then frowned as he said,
“My vision is blurry. I can’t see well. Sounds come to me small, as if from far away, and my headache is terrible. My nose has stopped bleeding now, but instead it feels like several people are hanging off my body.”
Kim Jaehee wrapped his left hand around the body of the mug. He had been gripping the handle with his right hand, but there was a crunch, and the handle separated from the mug. Kim Jaehee set the mug handle he had been holding in his right hand down on the table. The ceramic handle rolled across the tabletop with a ting.
It looked like he had broken it using the ring finger and little finger of his prosthetic right hand. I touched the cup I was holding, and it felt as hard as a chunk of stone. It seemed to be ceramic, so how did he break it? He said he wasn’t feeling well, but judging from what he’d just done, his grip strength seemed perfectly fine.
After breaking someone else’s mug without permission and setting the handleless body of the mug on the table, Kim Jaehee continued.
“Until an hour ago, I could see fine, and I could hear fine. I did have a headache, but it wasn’t this bad, and my body didn’t hurt this much, I wasn’t this dizzy, and I didn’t have tinnitus. Paralysis in my limbs or neurological damage might come next. Decompression sickness usually shows symptoms anywhere from within an hour to up to twenty-four hours, so the more time passes, the more symptoms may appear. I don’t want to live with these kinds of disabilities. I’ve already lost a lot.”
“…It’ll be treated.”
“You’ll regret it for the rest of your life. If the loop breaks this time and you end up living with permanent disabilities like these, I mean.”
Kim Jaehee, who had been putting the mug handle against the handleless mug and pulling it away again, raised his right hand and waved it.
“How did you injure that hand?”
Shin Haeryang, holding his mug in one hand and taking a sip of tea, asked Kim Jaehee from beneath the towel draped over his head.
“You said your leg was because of a landmine, but you never told us about your fingers.”
“I told you before.”
“That was a lie.”
“What did Jaehee say before?”
Shin Haeryang held his mug in both hands and let out a small sigh before speaking.
“Once, when another team employee asked why his fingers were like that, Jaehee answered that he had been hungry and had torn them off one by one to eat.”
Good grief. …No, right? Shin Haeryang said it was a lie, so it must not be true.
“He said that whenever he saw plump fingers, he wanted to eat them, and kept staring only at the other person’s hands until they got scared and ran away.”
“…Hyung Jihyeok has a surprisingly loose mouth. He told you everything. But thanks to that, Mila never comes near our team anymore.”
“That employee named Mila ran all the way to another undersea base and spread rumors that someone on our team was a cannibal. Every team leader I met asked whether you were on drugs.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said you weren’t, and that you were like that sober.”
A smile briefly appeared at the corners of Kim Jaehee’s mouth.
“How did you know it was a lie?”
“Even if they starve to death, people almost never eat their own fingers. And if you really had been so hungry you ate them, you would have eaten your left hand first. You’re right-handed.”
Kim Jaehee folded only the black ring finger and little finger among the five fingers of his right hand and said,
“I went to see a movie, and there was a fire, so I jumped down the stairs. I fell from the tenth floor, but I hit my fingers wrong against the fifth-floor railing and they were completely smashed. But because of my fingers, my falling speed slowed down, so I survived. I got caught and banged around here and there like laundry until I was rescued on the second floor. I probably fell about twenty meters. Still, isn’t it cooler to say I tore them off and ate them than to say the stair railing gobbled them up?”
I didn’t really understand Kim Jaehee’s idea of cool. The former was at least understandable, but if you answered with the latter, wouldn’t everyone run away? So the distance Kim Jaehee had escaped the loop was twenty meters vertically. For me, it seemed to be almost three thousand meters.
Without answering, Shin Haeryang held his cup and sipped from it, and I let out a sigh. Kim Jaehee pointed at himself and Shin Haeryang in turn, then said,
“And Savior. Are you planning to escape while taking both of us with you? In this situation?”
“Huh? Yes. We should all go together.”
“Of the three people here right now, I think Muhyeon-ssi’s condition is the best. Objectively speaking, it is. Just walking to the lounge ten meters away, both the team leader and I fell twice. It might have been different when our bodies were fine, but right now, to be honest, the team leader and I are burdens. We can barely even walk properly. …How about abandoning us and going alone?”
At this remark, Shin Haeryang looked at Kim Jaehee as if quite surprised and said,
“…I thought you’d beg Mr. Muhyeon to take you with him until the end.”
Kim Jaehee gave a light nod and said,
“I do want to cling to his ankles like a nuisance, wail at the top of my lungs, and hang disgracefully onto his back, begging him to take me.”
Shin Haeryang set his mug down on the table and said to me,
“If you think you’d like to act separately from here on… I won’t stop you. Neither Jaehee nor I will be of any practical help to you. If you believe going alone would be safer and easier, you may do so.”
What kind of bullshit is that?
“…What are the two of you planning to do without me?”
I can at least see ahead because one of my eyes is fake, but what are you two going to do? Kim Jaehee, whose forehead and the area beneath his nose were smeared with blood, and Shin Haeryang, whose eyes seemed to have burst blood vessels because the whites were entirely red, were both soaked to the bone and sitting on the sofa like dogs caught in the rain, and seeing them tell me to abandon them made my insides boil. In this world, where anyone could get hurt and become a patient at any time, if you only kept company with people when they were fine and healthy, could you even call that human? A curse rose all the way to my mouth, but I couldn’t swear in front of injured patients, so I barely swallowed it back down.
“Even if we die on the way, let’s go together.”
“…You have no obligation to do that.”
Were you born with that obligation carved onto your back, making you take people with you?
“Yes. I don’t. But Team Leader Shin, if one of your team members were injured, you would have taken them with you to the end, wouldn’t you? I must have been a burden to other people for a long time too. I’ve lived thanks to countless acts of kindness and pity, so I hope I can be of even a little help to someone else this time.”
I’m not going to abandon you and go alone, so don’t worry. Kim Jaehee placed the bloodstained towel on the table for a few seconds, then said,
“Or there is the simplest method. The easiest thing you can do for us, when we’re in pain and struggling.”
“What method is that?”
Kim Jaehee smiled for a moment. He looked at me as if watching some clueless rookie ask a foolish question to a veteran, then said,
“How about you just start over entirely?”
“Pardon?”
“Savior, you’re in a lot of pain and having a hard time right now too, aren’t you? It’s hard to walk, your head hurts, and aren’t you scared? It’s too hard to keep going, so you start again from the beginning. If you’ve never gone to the starting point on your own before, I can help you. I’ll help you start over again so it hurts as little as possible.”
Only after a few seconds did Kim Jaehee’s words register in my brain. I barely managed not to drop the cup I was holding. So, what he meant by helping me return to the beginning was that he would help me commit suicide. So I could wake up again at 7:02 in the morning.
“You’ll be able to reach this point in a healthier and more intact state. Then you might be able to proceed more easily and comfortably too.”
That option was just as repulsive as abandoning you here and leaving. What on earth was going on inside Kim Jaehee’s head? I thought about smacking Kim Jaehee’s smiling face with the mug. Until now, I had never died because I wanted to die. …Other people probably hadn’t died because they wanted to die either. We should be thinking desperately about surviving somehow. What bullshit about an easy and simple method.
“…I don’t want to do that.”
“What does going back to the starting point mean?”
Shin Haeryang asked Kim Jaehee. His expression said he didn’t understand what that meant. Kim Jaehee explained simply.
“If the Savior commits suicide here right now, then the Savior will go back to the past. He’ll probably wake up in the morning.”