I came out of Apep Diving without thinking, then stopped because I knew nowhere in the First Undersea Base. All I could think of was wanting to get out of the undersea base somehow; there wasn’t anywhere I wanted to wander around and explore. As I stood blankly in the diving area, Kim Jaehee, who had been walking up behind me, asked,
“Is there somewhere you’d like to go?”
“My home in Korea. I’m sick to death of undersea bases.”
At the sincerity tinged with my impatience, Kim Jaehee shrugged and said,
“In the First Undersea Base, I mean?”
“I don’t know.”
I came to a stop as if I’d lost my way in the corridor. I felt like a lost child. Then, suddenly, I thought of the diamond Elizabeth must have. Why was that so important in the middle of this disaster? Of course, if it was a diamond of that size, anyone would want to risk their life to keep it. But there were plenty of other jewels, so why had she taken only that one diamond in a situation where she had to flee a fire? Was it the most expensive of the hundred or so gems?
As far as I knew, diamonds weren’t the most expensive gems. Could it be that, like Shin Haeryang’s necklace, that diamond couldn’t pass beyond a certain range?
“Jaehee.”
“Yes.”
“You said the place with a lot of Infinite Church believers was the garden, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Shall I take you there?”
“Please. Lead the way. Not the route we took before.”
“Then this way, please.”
Kim Jaehee had torn up the top he had been wearing and wrapped it around his thigh, but he paid little attention to the injury and walked down the corridor with his usual gait. Perhaps because his stride was wider and faster than I’d expected, I was busy keeping up. I walked with the lapis lazuli necklace in my hand, but no matter how I looked at it, it showed no sign of turning to ash. Walking ahead in a cheerful voice, Kim Jaehee said to me,
“They say when the First Undersea Base was first built, it was a tiny place of less than five pyeong, and then they kept expanding it until it became this huge. Honestly, I wasn’t here back then, so I don’t know very well, but a few people who worked in mining are still around, and maybe that’s why, whenever they drink, there are some who go on endlessly about what this place used to be like, how harsh the undersea base environment was when they were greenhorns, and how much better the conditions are for people working here now. They say complaints about a little water leaking these days are nothing. Apparently, back then, even when muddy water had risen to their knees, they had to work if they had so much as a single bare light bulb, and they say people these days are spoiled.”
The experimental undersea farm I’d seen was a controlled space packed with crops and artificially maintained with limited light, nutrients, and temperature, so the site was unbelievably large. To think it had started at five pyeong. It was hard to imagine. And it seemed the working environment had been terrible then and now alike.
Kim Jaehee told me about going to the mining team and getting some liquor they’d secretly stashed away, about people on the mining teams who smuggled in hidden drugs, and about those who had existing criminal records and mental illnesses but concealed them to get in.
Until the undersea base collapsed, I wanted to lie down somewhere no one could see me and cry or sleep, but while listening to Kim Jaehee’s sensational stories, I managed to keep walking forward without dozing off. Kim Jaehee couldn’t have been employed here that long either, yet somehow he’d managed to collect all these stories from all kinds of people. ……Shin Haeryang, Seo Jihyeok, and Baek Aeyeong must have had quite a hard time. Listening to the stories he was spilling out, it felt as if Kim Jaehee would have disappeared the moment they looked away.
“Criminal records? You mean prior convictions?”
“Yes. One person said it was unfair, that he’d gone to prison because he stole the TV and dog from the old man next door. There are quite a few people who have mental illnesses but hid them to come in, too. I heard one of them grinding his teeth, saying he’d paid as much as three thousand dollars to get in while hiding that fact.”
“What about you, Jaehee?”
You didn’t pay your way in too, did you?
“Well. When I first joined, I was given a few test sheets, but surprisingly, pretending to be normal wasn’t that hard. What about you, Savior?”
“When I think about the people in this undersea base right now, I don’t think I’m normal either.”
What a fine state this undersea base was in. I should have known from the moment it was swarming with people whose passing of a psychological evaluation was a mystery. As I listened to Kim Jaehee’s one-sided stories, it suddenly occurred to me less how he had met and mingled with those people, and more whether those people had any topics they could talk about with an engineer.
“The team leader of Mining Team One is missing his index and middle fingers on his right hand. He says he lost them in an accident, but if you listen to what people around him say, they say they were cut off because he hit on a mafioso’s girlfriend. He asked me where I got my finger prostheses made. His tone was almost like he wanted to yank them off and take them. And I didn’t know this either, but because the mining team people see me using a prosthetic leg, they naturally assume I lost my leg in an industrial accident.”
Well. I suppose they could think that.
“What did you mainly talk about?”
“I asked them where they got their tattoos and what they meant. It’s easy. You just lightly compliment the other person’s tattoo and talk. It’s good if I add stories about my own tattoos, too.”
“Did they answer well?”
“Yes. They explained things quite kindly.”
That was a relief. It seemed Kim Jaehee hadn’t exchanged punches while talking to people from other teams.
“If you get a tattoo somewhere visible, you have to answer the question of why you got it for the rest of your life. Among the people on Mining Team Two, there was someone with a really cool spiderweb tattoo on his elbow, so I asked where and who he’d gotten such a tattoo from. I said it was so cool I wanted to ask that person to tattoo me too, and he said he’d gotten the elbow tattoo in prison. Do you know how people in prison do tattoos?”
“No. I have no idea.”
I had never been to prison. I didn’t know what prisons overseas were like, but thinking of the prisons I’d encountered through various media, they didn’t seem to have good facilities.
“They said they made the ink by melting and burning black plastic chess pieces, then mixing the soot with lotion. And in prison, they make a simple tattoo machine with an electric razor and a ballpoint pen, but needles are hard to get, so they straighten out the spring inside the ballpoint pen, sharpen the end, and use that as the needle.”
I had never considered myself especially fussy about hygiene, but as a dentist who often put his fingers in people’s mouths, the moment I heard Kim Jaehee’s explanation, I felt the urge to faint dead away. They stuck something like that into their skin and dug around? Just imagining it made me feel like it would get infected and inflamed. Would anyone in their right mind get a tattoo in such terrible conditions? Or maybe not. If they were capable of that kind of judgment, perhaps they wouldn’t have gone to prison in the first place.
Out of guilt, my eyes naturally went to Kim Jaehee’s thigh. Looking at the brown and green designs engraved on his pitch-black calf, I asked,
“Is the pattern engraved on your prosthetic leg a grapevine?”
“……I’ve been waiting for you to ask that. Savior, you don’t really ask about other people’s outward features. Usually people ask a lot as soon as they meet me.”
“Because that’s manners.”
“It is a grapevine. The winding stems are pretty, and the leaves are pretty too. It’s quite cool, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s cool.”
When I praised it readily, Kim Jaehee, who had been walking ahead, ran a hand over his own calf once and said,
“Originally, I was going to have olive leaves engraved on my calf. They’re a symbol of peace all over the world, the leaves are beautiful, and olive trees love sunlight, so they can’t survive without an enormous amount of light. They live a long time, too, so if you take good care of them, they can surprisingly live for hundreds of years.”
I had never thought about olive trees beyond olives and olive oil, so I nodded as I listened to Kim Jaehee’s explanation. The only reason I knew the pattern engraved on Kim Jaehee’s prosthetic leg was a grapevine was because I at least knew the shape of grape leaves. Their leaves had a distinctive shape.
“You know a lot about olive trees. I’ve never heard that explanation before. Is there a reason you changed from an olive tree to a grapevine?”
“After the loop, when I got my repaired prosthetic leg and was about to engrave the olive tree I’d planned, some part of my heart just couldn’t accept an olive tree. I hadn’t thought like that before. Where in the world is peace supposed to be? A symbol of peace on this tiny lump of a planet that’s constantly at war without a moment’s rest? When I tried to engrave an olive tree, standing firm in the sunlight, onto my leg, it turned my stomach.”
Was that so? Well. I thought an olive tree would have suited Kim Jaehee’s leg very well, too. Though, of course, that was only my limited opinion as someone who had never actually seen an olive tree and had learned the shape of its leaves from the packaging of olive oil made by major companies.
Kim Jaehee’s grapevine continued to move. The foot of his prosthetic leg was covered by a shoe, but it seemed likely that grapevines wrapped around the whole thing all the way to the sole.
“Grapevines are climbing plants. Parasitic plants can’t survive unless they drink the water and nutrients of their hosts. Climbing plants are completely different from parasitic plants. They have a tendency to climb along supports, but they photosynthesize on their own and live on the nutrients they make themselves. And grapes can be made into alcohol, too.”
Listening to Kim Jaehee explain the difference between climbing plants and parasitic plants, I realized the plants I knew were almost limited to things that could be eaten. As a human more interested in grapes than grapevines, each time I listened to his explanation while walking, I came to understand how little I had known about plants. It was similar to when Yugeum occasionally talked about marine creatures I knew nothing about.
“……Maybe the reason I drew a climbing plant on my leg is because I heard so many times that if my leg hadn’t been like this, my older brother would have lived, or that he died because I was parasitizing him. Though, surprisingly, the number of times I saved him is too many to count on my fingers.”
At the severity of the verbal abuse Kim Jaehee had heard, I felt as if the sleepiness that had made me nod off while walking had completely vanished.
“For your mental health, it’s best to ignore words like that. They’re words people who know nothing throw at you just to hurt you.”
“Humans are the ones who are parasitic animals, living off plants. The tattoos on my chest are almost all parasitic plants. What you can see here on my neck are the leaves and flowers of the herb of immortality.”
Kim Jaehee kept walking as he explained the five tattoos engraved on his chest. Aside from the herb of immortality and rafflesia, most of them were mistletoes. As I listened to his explanation, by the time we arrived at the door leading into the garden, I found myself going inside without realizing it.