After hearing that, Kim Jae-hui lay spread-eagled on the road, limp as wet seaweed. Seeing him like that, I understood why, from a distance, I’d mistaken that red head of his for a flower.
“How long have you been lying there?”
“About... three minutes? Now I’m going to lie here for about three hundred minutes and do nothing.”
And just as he said, Kim Jae-hui really lay there and did nothing. A Medic was no different from an ambulance. The bastard who had dragged out a patient being transported perfectly well didn’t even get in himself, but simply lay on the ground. Maybe Kim Jae-hui was in worse shape than I was.
I was truly glad to see him again. I wanted to hug him, and at the same time I wanted to sock him with my fist. Considering the proverb about giving an extra rice cake to the person you hate, people in the old days must have been truly magnanimous. My heart was no different from a petty man’s, so I would only have given an extra rice cake to someone who had lived kindly.
Looking back on everything Kim Jae-hui had done until now, the fact that he had come out onto Daehan-do on his own two feet was truly commendable.
Given Kim Jae-hui’s personality, it was astonishing that he had climbed four thousand stairs. It was so unbelievable that I wondered if my mental state was bad enough for me to be hallucinating Kim Jae-hui sprawled on the ground.
I took the bag from the beggar who had seemingly leased the whole road and opened it. Inside were a salon towel and a Rhaphidophora wrapped round and round in cloth. How soaked with seawater was it? Was it all right for a plant to touch seawater? It probably wasn’t, was it? As I fumbled over the Rhaphidophora and the towel, I realized the cloth bag wasn’t wet in the slightest. On top of that, its condition was fine, and none of the roots or stems were damaged. They said the Third Undersea Base had been submerged, but he must have taken great care bringing it here.
Seeing the green plant arrive on Daehan-do in one piece stirred up fresh emotions. Suddenly, I remembered the time I left in the escape craft someone had yielded to me. Back then, I had promised to take the Rhaphidophora to Daehan-do and return it to Tumanako no matter what. He had threatened me, saying that if his plant died, he wouldn’t leave my hair alone. I remembered how, right before I died, I had tried to save at least the Rhaphidophora by throwing the cloth bag above the surface of the water, and failed.
I took a deep breath and tried to let go of that despairing memory. I had failed, but sometimes, in this way, someone else managed to save what you couldn’t.
I gently stroked the leaves of the Rhaphidophora with my fingertips. I felt the firm yet soft texture of the plant. Seeing sunlight pour down over the Rhaphidophora made it feel as though my heart, which had been soaked through with seawater, had dried out completely. Thinking of Tumanako, the plant’s owner, I missed for a moment the people who had been there with me then.
A strange sound came from Kim Jae-hui’s prosthetic leg as he lay stretched out in a straight line. A small noise kept coming from his left calf, a steady humming. Come to think of it, his left leg had been moving every which way. It must have been hard coming all the way here with a broken prosthetic.
When I had instructed Kim Jae-hui over the phone to escape with the Rhaphidophora, I honestly hadn’t expected much. Thinking of Kim Jae-hui, who had given up swimming and simply stayed submerged in the water, I had thought he might give up from the start, saying it was too hard, then share seawater with the Rhaphidophora and die there. Or that he might come up alone, get into an accident in the darkness, or be badly injured and end up unable to move either way. But he had escaped this well.
Gratitude and a small sense of emotion surged into my chest like the tide, gradually filling it. The fact that he hadn’t given up and had come this far was something.
“What route did you take to get up here?”
At my question, Kim Jae-hui muttered in a weak voice.
“From the Third Undersea Base, I climbed the endless stairs of hell... took the elevator at the Second Undersea Base, took the elevator at the First Undersea Base too, and came here.”
“Didn’t anyone stop you while you were taking the elevators out to Daehan-do?”
“I’m a believer of the Muhan Church, and my prosthetic was in such bad shape that nobody paid attention to me.”
True. The reason he could escape so easily was probably because he was a believer of the Muhan Church. Was Kim Jae-hui lying here because he couldn’t stand properly? Even when he stopped the Medic earlier, one of his legs had looked uncomfortable. Looking closely at Kim Jae-hui, I saw scratches and bruises all over him. I couldn’t tell whether he had rolled down the stairs or been beaten by someone. Looking at his face, it didn’t seem like he had lost any teeth.
“How did you climb the stairs?”
“...It was dark, and there was no one around, so there was no need to care about appearances or dignity. My left leg wouldn’t listen to me either, so I crawled on all fours. It felt like my human rights were being completely shattered. Once again, I realized that humans are beings who crawl through darkness where they can’t predict even an inch ahead, pick up dust to eat, and live in pain.”
Get a grip. I’d crawled intermittently while using those stairs too, but I hadn’t had thoughts that dramatic. Had it been that hard for him? It seemed like he had escaped alone, and there were so many things I wanted to ask. He didn’t seem to have brought any separate light either, so had he crawled up through the darkness with nothing at all?
Kim Jae-hui stared blankly at the blue sky as if he couldn’t believe it, then continued.
“There’s a place that built an entire temple around the idea that ‘those who wish to behold God must humbly crawl on all fours.’ Do you know it?”
“No. I’ve never heard of it. Is it a temple overseas?”
“Yeah... Are you the god I’m supposed to crawl around and worship?”
Kim Jae-hui, who had been squinting the whole time as if the sunlight made it hard to open his eyes, stared straight at my face as I sat on the ground, out of strength. If I said yes, would the bastard lying there with every bit of road dust smeared all over him respectfully get up?
Silence fell for a moment, as if he were waiting for an answer. Remembering our phone call, I replied.
“...I’m just a human friend. I’m not anything like a god.”
“...”
“How did you get out of the stairwell? If you climb all the way to the end, there’s no separate exit, so you have to break through the wall partway up.”
In a dejected voice, Kim Jae-hui spoke as though everything in the world was a bother.
“I decided to stop climbing and die, so I rammed my head into the wall, and the wall broke.”
Ah. Please. The moment I heard Kim Jae-hui’s answer, I sighed as if I were going to cough up my lungs. Talking to this bastard made it feel like my whole body hurt.
“Jae-hui, you went through a lot. The owner of the Rhaphidophora will be incredibly happy too. It’s a plant treasured by Tumanako Oranga, who runs a hair salon, because he said he received it as a gift from a friend. He’ll be happy to know it’s on Daehan-do like this.”
“That Rhaphidophora doesn’t belong to someone named Tumanako.”
Kim Jae-hui reached toward the cloth bag and said confidently.
“I saved it, so now it’s mine.”
I was so dumbfounded that I laughed. Ha ha ha. What nonsense was this now?
“If you save something, Jae-hui, does it belong to you from that moment on?”
“Yeah.”
“Then conversely, if someone saves you, do you become that person’s property?”
“That’s right.”
By Kim Jae-hui’s logic, firefighters must each own over a hundred people. Doctors must own countless people. Even dentists must own several.
“If you save a life, you have to take responsibility for it. I’m going to take care of it until I die.”
“What do you mean, ‘that’s right’? Don’t say things that make no sense. The Rhaphidophora will go back to its owner. And you saved yourself from a leaking undersea base, so you don’t belong to anyone.”
I looked at the person who had escaped the undersea base on his own two feet, then shifted my gaze to the Rhaphidophora. And with difficulty, I opened my mouth.
“In the past, I tried to bring this Rhaphidophora to Daehan-do, but I failed. ...But thanks to you not giving up and making the effort, it succeeded this time. And besides this Rhaphidophora, I also tried to bring people to Daehan-do, but I failed many times. Even so, I’m going to believe there’s still hope.”
That somewhere I didn’t know, people were saving one another. Kim Jae-hui shattered my sentiment as he said,
“I gave up about a thousand times in the middle, though.”
Did you give up every four steps? But on the thousand-and-first time, you succeeded. That was enough. Kim Jae-hui stared at me, then said as if slightly disappointed,
“You’re a little more anticlimactic than I imagined from your voice on the phone, and better than what I’d braced myself for.”
It seemed the person who had given impossible missions through anonymous phone calls was far too different from what he had imagined. Yeah. I look ordinary, don’t I? Not distinctive, charismatic, or handsome enough to play the role of a cult savior.
“Did you imagine that as long as you brought the Rhaphidophora up to Daehan-do, I would fly around proclaiming in a thunderous voice that I would grant the promised salvation, with fish playing instruments beside me and flowers falling like wind and rain?”
“I wish it were like that. I wish someone would save me and send me back to the past.”
I couldn’t understand Kim Jae-hui’s mental state completely, but I understood a little of what he was feeling right now.
“Acting according to my instructions was hard and boring and not very fun, right?”
“Yeah.”
Kim Jae-hui answered honestly.
“Still, please remain the very best and kindest Kim Jae-hui for today.”
Because thanks to the Kim Jae-hui of before, who had given up on the vicious plan to set fire to the chamber Sin Hae-ryang or I had been inside, we could at least face each other now.
This commendable bastard had climbed four thousand stairs without getting even a single drop of seawater on the plant... So how could he treat himself and other people like such utter trash?
I looked at the leg with grapevines drawn on it. Hadn’t they said that unlike parasitic plants, vines photosynthesized by their own power and lived on the nutrients they made themselves?
“Jae-hui. Is it hard to treat people like plants?”
“People are tiresome.”
“You’re a person too, Jae-hui.”
“I’m tired of me too.”
Sigh. I ended the conversation with a sigh and hid the plant, bag and all, behind the elevator. It wouldn’t die right away.
Kim Jae-hui lay there for ten minutes, doing nothing but resting, then slowly gathered himself up. His left leg seemed to be the problem; the prosthetic didn’t appear to be moving properly. Then he tried to take the elevator back down again.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to attend the prayer ceremony.”
No matter how much I searched, my finger wasn’t on me. The Medic wouldn’t have taken it, so Dylan must have.
“I’d rather you not go there, Jae-hui.”
“Why?”
“There’s nothing to see there, and it won’t be fun. They say a believer of the Muhan Church took my finger, offered it on the altar, and is going to soak it in coffee water and drink it. Rather than seeing that, staying here is much better.”
“I want to drink that too, though.”
You lunatic.
“I’ll make you a cup of coffee, so don’t even think about drinking that shit.”