The sea seen through the cable car was completely black. This cable car was supposed to go up from -200 meters to the First Undersea Base at -50 meters, right? I pinched my nose with one hand and looked out through the transparent window. There was almost no light inside the small car racing through the deep-blue darkness, probably because if the inside of the cable car were bright, we wouldn’t be able to see outside. Under different circumstances, riding this thing might have been kind of fun. I swallowed the clot of blood that had entered my mouth and said,
“This is my first time riding an undersea cable car.”
“Mine as well.”
The moment Sin Haeryang said that, he checked on Baek Aeyeong like a robot whose switch had just been flipped on. I opened the bag with the snake in it. Inside the bag were a towel that was no better than a rag and Noeul, the orange whale plushie. The moment I saw the doll and the towel, I handed them straight to Sin Haeryang. He gripped them tightly and pressed them against Baek Aeyeong’s waist. The orange plushie began to turn bright red. Sin Haeryang lifted his head, looked at my face, and asked,
“What happened to you, Mr. Muhyeon?”
“It’s a nosebleed. I’m fine. What about Aeyeong?”
“She needs treatment quickly.”
At those words, I wiped my ruined nose with the back of my bloodstained hand and nodded. The nosebleed was almost stopping. But the cable car was practically crawling. The number beside the oxygen concentration, which read -195 meters, was gradually decreasing, but far too slowly. I saw the snake lying still, its body coiled on the bottom of the bag, and let out a long sigh. Then, leaning my head against the glass wall, I asked,
“Do cable cars normally move this slowly?”
I asked in case it had broken down, and Sin Haeryang looked at the meter reading the cable car was passing before answering.
“Yes. It has to move slowly. Because of the water pressure.”
…So if it went fast, the cable car might explode or something. Sin Haeryang laid Baek Aeyeong straight on the floor, and whenever the headache came at me as if it would split my skull open, I clutched at the space between my brows. I wished I could take just one aspirin. Sin Haeryang looked at Baek Aeyeong and me, then checked his gun, and even checked the bullets in the gun strapped to Baek Aeyeong’s body. Then, with his eyes closed, he said,
“There may be armed personnel waiting for us at the end of the cable car line.”
I started to nod, but realized Sin Haeryang had his eyes closed, perhaps from exhaustion, and answered aloud.
“Yes.”
I couldn’t tell whether Baek Aeyeong had passed out or fallen asleep. What was clear was that her chest was rising and falling, and that fact gave everyone in this cable car some mental comfort. I hoped no one else would die anymore. If we got out of this wretched undersea place and she received treatment quickly, Baek Aeyeong would be fine, wouldn’t she?
Sin Haeryang, who was pressing down on Baek Aeyeong’s wound, had blood running from beside his left temple down his cheek, perhaps because his skin had been torn. Even when I tried not to look at the wound, if I turned my head toward Sin Haeryang, it kept coming into view. I searched through the bag with my left hand, trying somehow to find something to stop it, but there wasn’t anything particularly useful. Most of what was inside was trash from the food I’d eaten while climbing the stairs. I’d felt guilty throwing it on the floor, so it had remained in the bag exactly as it was.
I looked inside the bag, sighed once, and tried to tear off the left sleeve of the long-sleeved hoodie I was wearing. But when I tried to rip it apart with my grip strength, it absolutely refused to tear. Why won’t this thing rip! Clothes these days are made too well! Before I knew it, my eyes met Sin Haeryang’s, and he was looking at me as if to ask what on earth I was doing. After watching me struggle, Sin Haeryang asked,
“Are you trying to tear your clothes?”
“Yes.”
At that, Sin Haeryang pulled the knife strapped to Baek Aeyeong’s thigh with one hand and leaned toward me. I quickly slipped my left arm out of the sleeve and tucked it in toward my torso. Sin Haeryang easily sliced the sleeve open with the knife and handed it to me. I didn’t take it, and shook my head.
“Press that against your forehead. You’re bleeding from your left temple.”
Sin Haeryang looked at the strip of cloth, but instead of pressing it to his face, he wrapped it around his left forearm. I hadn’t known, but it seemed Sin Haeryang had been shot in the left arm. I took my hand away from my nose, which I’d been pressing with my right sleeve. The blood that had pooled there ran down my philtrum and over my lips. I wiped the blood away with the fabric on my right forearm, then hesitated over the blood gathered in my mouth before spitting it into a corner of the floor. If I swallowed it, I felt like it would get stuck in my throat. Watching the state I was in, Sin Haeryang asked,
“Is that because of the gunfire?”
“I don’t know. My nose just suddenly started bleeding.”
The hoodie that had once been sky-blue was a mess. I’d happened to put it on in the laundry room in Cheongnyong-dong, and though I didn’t know who the owner was, if I ever met them, I’d have to buy them a new one or something. I lifted my head and looked toward the cable car door. -170 meters. We really were going up slowly. Thoughts of Yugeum and Seo Jihyeok came rushing in like the ebbing tide.
To think as little as possible, I looked outside into the darkness. The sea was pitch-black. Only by staring out at it did I realize it was an ink-dark blue. I couldn’t see them, but there were probably an enormous number of marine creatures inside that color. They might even be watching things without gills or swim bladders struggle desperately to live after entering the sea.
At that moment, the cable car stopped. It did not move from -150 meters. I kept watching for a few seconds in case the number might change, then said to Sin Haeryang, who was looking at Baek Aeyeong,
“Mr. Haeryang. I think this thing stopped.”
“…So it has.”
“Is there anything we can do to get the cable car operating normally again?”
“No.”
Sharp as a knife. I almost asked, Are we dead now? but then thought I might not be able to handle whatever answer Sin Haeryang gave, so I shut my mouth. Sin Haeryang looked around the cable car and said,
“Let’s wait. It may be an emergency stop.”
“I hope it starts running again.”
I sat there anxiously and waited, sometimes wiping the sweat running down Baek Aeyeong’s forehead with the least dirty part of my sleeve, and otherwise staring endlessly at the number frozen at -150 meters. It was more horrible than being trapped in an elevator. At least then, it hadn’t been this painful or hopeless. I’d been scared then too, but it couldn’t even compare to now. The situation of being trapped in a cable car was so absurd that I laughed as if my soul had left my body and said,
“I never imagined I’d end up trapped like this in a place like this.”
“Nor did I.”
Even though Sin Haeryang was trapped 150 meters beneath the sea in a space less than ten square meters with two people in poor physical condition, he looked perfectly fine. He looked much the same as he had while climbing the stairs, and I admired him inwardly. I felt like I was going to lose my mind from fear. I wanted to burst into tears right then and there.
“How can you be so calm?”
“Do I look that way?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad at least one person appears calm in this situation.”
Looks like he felt like he was going crazy too. Rather than fall into deeper despair over the fact that I was trapped without any safety measures inside a machine suspended in the undersea void, I tried to think about something else. When I searched through the recent past I’d experienced, there wasn’t much that was good. I thought of Yugeum, and then I remembered the things Yugeum had said. The young woman who said she didn’t want to live forever without a brain or a heart. She could have lived longer. She shouldn’t have died in such a horrible place.
“…If we were to live infinite eternal lives.”
Sin Haeryang lifted his head and looked at me.
“Wouldn’t being trapped 150 meters underwater be something we could easily escape from? Without dying, I mean.”
“…If one were unlucky, one could continue drowning while trapped. Infinitely.”
The moment I heard Sin Haeryang’s words, goosebumps rose all over my back. Damn it. Should I consider it fortunate that I could die at any moment? Sin Haeryang rummaged through Baek Aeyeong’s bag, which had been taken off and left in the corner. An empty water bottle and a few pieces of candy I had given her came out. Did she not like candy? There was a tablet with a crack down the middle, and underneath it, a fifty-year-old bottle of Ballantine’s. When I saw that, I laughed in disbelief. The cat that had been on my back had been hit by a bullet fired by someone unknown, yet that liquor bottle that had been on Baek Aeyeong’s back was perfectly fine without even a scratch. When Sin Haeryang tore open the seal on the liquor, which was closer to the color of earth than brown, I was startled and stopped him.
“You’re not planning to pour that on her wound, are you?”
“…I’m going to drink a mouthful.”
“…Yes. Drink as much as you like.”
The thing they did in movies, gulping down alcohol and then pouring it on a wound too, was only possible in movies. Unless it was around eighty percent alcohol, it would only make the wound worse. At my last words, Sin Haeryang gave a faint laugh, swallowed a mouthful, grimaced, and then held the bottle out to me. I usually only drank beer when I drank at all, and didn’t drink much, so after hesitating for a few seconds, I took the bottle and drank a mouthful.
…Damn it. The instant I took one sip, I read the label. The alcohol content was over thirty percent. Were they insane? Why would anyone drink this? People who drank whiskey were the ones I understood least in the world. It felt as if everything from my throat to my stomach was burning as though I’d swallowed hydrochloric acid. I coughed several times, paying the price for that single sip of liquor.
I watched Sin Haeryang in case he became dead drunk, but after that one mouthful, he closed the bottle and set it on the cable car seat. I also thought I’d drunk only a mouse’s tear, but unexpectedly, heat flared through my entire body. Then the tipsiness rose all the way to the top of my head. I’d really drunk so little, though? With heat rushing up into my face, I became flustered. Sin Haeryang didn’t seem much different from before he drank. Was it because we were under the sea? Touching my heated face, I asked,
“Can you drink alcohol and then swim?”
All of a sudden, I remembered the famous saying that more people drowned in alcohol than drowned in the sea. Since I was currently on the verge of drowning in the sea, I looked anxiously at the dark seawater and asked. Sin Haeryang shook his head slightly.
“If I had intended to swim, I would not have drunk.”
“No, then why.”
“Because we have no painkillers.”
“Ah…”
And then silence fell. I couldn’t tell whether those words meant there was no need to swim, or that we would die even if we tried. I struggled to calm my helplessly anxious heart. I wanted to stand up in the narrow cable car right now and fidget and stamp my feet restlessly, but I held myself back.
Anxiety spreads easily. No matter how hard and difficult it is, don’t give up hope. Be composed, act as if nothing is wrong. Being scared won’t do any good in this situation. It’s not as if the sea will spare my life, and to those without gills, it is fair to everyone. If fear paralyzes reason, then I won’t be able to do anything, so stay calm. It’s okay. You’ve done well up to now. Just getting this far is something.