Two men lay sprawled on beach beds by the shore, each sunk in his own gloom as they stared out at the sea. Having completely lost both the strength and the will to walk, I stared at the water with lifeless eyes, sighing heavily alongside Kim Jaehee, who lay beside me looking utterly dejected.
“Jaehee. Are you having a hard time?”
I couldn’t tell whether Kim Jaehee was more distressed by my saying I wouldn’t go back to the past, or by the fact that all the teammates he had worked with for so long were somewhere underwater, their fates unknown.
“Mr. Muhyeon, you said you’re not going back to the past. Even in the head of a believer like me, who only shallowly believed for the purpose of gathering information, an explosion is going off. The believers who seriously believe in the Muhan Church probably fainted or cried and made a scene the moment they heard you say that.”
Ah. As expected. It seemed the former was more distressing to him. They say that once you join a cult, you start prioritizing the religion over family, relatives, and friends. Meanwhile, I would have no greater wish than for even one of your teammates to show up and let me see their face.
I had been staring endlessly out at the open sea, just in case more escape boats surfaced, but at Kim Jaehee’s words, I laughed in disbelief. I didn’t know how Kim Jaehee interpreted my laughter, but he explained in more detail.
“The savior promised by the Muhan Church did descend as scheduled, but the wishes of the believers and the savior’s thoughts are completely different in a decisive way. The believers thought that if you came and granted a miracle, they could go to the heaven they wanted. But imagine being told, ‘This hell is actually heaven. You can’t run away, and you have to live here.’ Sob, sob. How painfully the believers have to struggle and live in reality. They thought the Messiah would send us back to a beautified past and save us from reality, but even without fingers, even with people dying, you say you won’t go back to the past. You might as well tell us to die together. Sob, sob.”
Kim Jaehee’s pitiful fake crying filled my ears. He spoke as if it were unfair that people had to endure the cruel storms and hardships of a difficult, harsh world and struggle to live. That’s just how life is.
Listening to the way Kim Jaehee talked, the phrase life is suffering suddenly came to mind. Who was it that said that?
I shifted on the unfamiliar beach bed and kicked at the sand with my shoe. Then something touched the tip of my shoe, and when I checked, I saw the mouth of a sealed glass bottle buried in the sand. I gently brushed the sand away with my right hand, and beneath it was a bottle of vodka, cold as ice, buried under the sand.
The moment I saw the vodka, someone suddenly came to mind. ……Vladimir had come to the dental clinic and said that, hadn’t he? I wondered if that man was still alive.
When the owner of the bottle buried this vodka on the beach, it seemed they had left it there half-frozen. The ice had almost melted, but perhaps because it had been buried deep in the sand under the shade, the bottle was as cold as the waters of the North Sea. I held the vodka bottle and rubbed it over my flimsy shin, using it as a cold compress.
Ice-cold vodka on a beach where drinking was prohibited. They had probably buried it beside the beach bed intending to play on the beach for a while, then drink it once it had thawed a bit in the sunlight. After the terrorists occupied the beach, it seemed to have been forgotten by its owner.
With the uneasy thought that if I thoroughly searched around this beach bed and parasol, I might find more bottles of alcohol or snacks to go with them, I stared at the bottle I was rubbing against my shin.
The bottle was extremely sturdy, and the alcohol content was fairly high. The memory of the Ballantine’s that had struck my thigh came to mind, and at the same time I remembered drinking with Shin Haeryang inside the cable car at the undersea base. It hadn’t been a bad memory. Holding the bottle, I began debating whether or not to drink it. Just then, Kim Jaehee let out another long sigh and said,
“I want to kill you painlessly and send you back to the beginning. You must have had some good past, right? Would you consider saving just me?”
As I lightly shook the bottle in my hand to check whether it was sealed, I said,
“If you try, Jaehee, you will never meet me again for the rest of your life.”
Looking at the label, I saw “Beluga” written on it, along with a large drawing of a fish I had never seen before. I didn’t know what was going on with the mouth of the bottle, but even when I put strength into my right hand, it wouldn’t open. What was wrong with the opening of this bottle? When I grew flustered over the bottle that wouldn’t open, Kim Jaehee quietly watched me and asked,
“Are you trying to open the bottle?”
“Yes. I just want one sip.”
Not a single one of the people I had saved or traveled with might have made it to Daehan Island. I might have to quit being a dentist. On top of that, I had been falling and getting hurt all day, so my entire body ached. I might have to spend quite a long time in the hospital. My left hand in particular kept sending waves of pain through me.
At times like this, I needed to keep my head on straight, but when my body was a wreck, staying sane wasn’t easy. If this had been coffee, I would have cried and drunk it the moment I found it. The only reason I hadn’t drunk it until now was because it was alcohol.
Kim Jaehee held out his hand, so I handed him the bottle. Kim Jaehee gripped the bottle with his left hand and used his right like a hammer, striking the mouth of the bottle again and again. Under the force of two wills as hard as steel, the wax cracked and then shattered completely. ……So it could be used like that too. Beneath the broken wax cap was a wire seal, and Kim Jaehee tore it off by force using his fourth and fifth fingers. Then he handed the bottle back to me. Underneath was a cork stopper. When I pulled the stopper out with the strength of my right hand, it made a small pop.
When I brought my nose to the open bottle, there was a faint smell of disinfectant. I hesitated for a moment at the “40%” written on the bottle. Then I took just one sip into my mouth and swallowed it. The instant it went down my throat, I could tell exactly where my esophagus and stomach were.
Every digestive organ the vodka touched felt as if it were burning. The heat that started in my stomach climbed all the way up to my ears and head. The inside of my ears itched with warmth. I immediately regretted drinking alcohol in my wretched physical condition. ……I shouldn’t have drunk it.
What on earth did people drink this for? There was a fish on the label—did they grind fish into it? Where the hell was this made? ……Do Russians not have taste buds?
After one sip, I closed the bottle with a grave expression. There had been a reason the manufacturer had sealed this vodka so elaborately. It meant, Don’t drink this. Kim Jaehee reached his hand toward the bottle and said,
“Mr. Muhyeon. I want some too.”
“How much are you planning to drink?”
I was about to hand him the bottle unconsciously, but stopped. Even if Kim Jaehee got dead drunk and jumped into the sea, I had neither the strength nor the stamina to stop him. Still, after climbing four thousand steps, and after skipping the prayer ceremony where all the believers of the Muhan Church were supposedly gathered, perhaps today’s Kim Jaehee deserved to look at the beach scenery and share at least one sip of alcohol with a fake savior.
“I want to drink enough to die. So I only live today, and there’s no tomorrow.”
“……Don’t drink something this awful.”
“If I die drinking vodka, please go back to the past and save me. Or you can just watch me die there.”
Ignoring Kim Jaehee’s nonsense, I buried the bottle back in the sand where it had been. The one-sip delinquency I had committed vanished as if it had never existed in this world. There was only one witness in front of me, and Kim Jaehee didn’t care about a deviation as minor as drinking on the beach.
Even though I knew the number of escape boats floating far out on the beach hadn’t changed, I pretended not to know and counted them again. And at the unchanging number of escape boats, tears leaked from one eye like a broken faucet. I hurriedly wiped them away with my forearm. Across this beach, on the cliff on the other side of the island, they said escape boats from the Jujak-dong Research Center were floating there. Maybe, because of the current, the escape boats had gathered on that side. Would it be better to move from here to the opposite side instead?
Kim Jaehee dug through the sand with his prosthetic leg, much like I had, then seemed puzzled when his foot caught on something and started digging. Then Kim Jaehee, too, pulled out an intact bottle of alcohol with a bewildered expression. He brushed the sand off a bottle of vodka with a picture on it that might have been a snake or a dragon. ……It seemed you could harvest vodka like clams on the beaches of Daehan Island, or else insane people were constantly burying vodka here.
Watching Kim Jaehee dig out the bottle, I laughed like a madman. At that, perhaps thinking I was short on alcohol, Kim Jaehee handed me the bottle he had dug up.
On the label were the English words “Royal Dragon” and a large, long-bodied dragon. Where was this liquor made now? I stared blankly at the bottle’s label, then raised my head as goosebumps rose from the crown of my head down to my toes.
There, I saw a massive snake draped over the beach and more than half the island, including the Daehan Island headquarters. The rest of its body was submerged in the sea, but the snake was so huge that the escape boats floating on the water seemed as if they were all being crushed beneath its body. Kim Jaehee was saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear anything.
I couldn’t figure out where its head was at all. Just the vertical length of the body visible in front of me looked to be nearly over seven meters. I didn’t think I could even measure its width. Was I drunk and seeing things? Had I drunk not one sip, but the entire bottle? Or had the pain and stress been so severe that my brain had broken? Mm. Both made sense. I was too exhausted, too hopeless, and I had been continuously taking painkillers while also drinking alcohol.
I hurled every kind of word at that hallucination. I told it not to interfere with the people coming up in escape boats or submarines, and I interrogated it, asking if it was the mastermind behind all this. I also subtly expressed my opinion that I hoped the people in the undersea base had survived. I demanded to know where and how a creature like it had lived all this time without appearing on a documentary channel, and asked what on earth it had eaten to grow into a living thing this enormous.
The snake, with its absurdly massive bulk, said nothing. Was that a snake? Or could it be a dragon? Like someone nearly drunk, I admired the scales on the creature’s body, then stepped wrong on the sand and fell magnificently backward. Kim Jaehee walked toward me.
Only after I lay spread-eagled on the ground could I see the massive snake’s head. The snake was looking down at me from the sky, gazing straight down from directly above the crown of my head. As I looked closely, the snake’s appearance was very familiar.
That thing should be inside my backpack.