I took a few steps back at Kevin’s shout. Then, like that, I faced him down. Kevin seemed extremely bothered by me coming up beside him. Either that, or he didn’t like my greeting.
I slung my backpack around to the front, lowered the zipper a little, and thrust my hand inside. After rummaging around, I pulled out a bottle of normal saline, a spray-type antiseptic, and a few packaged painkillers.
I knelt on one knee where I was. From somewhere behind me came the sound of someone sucking in a breath. I started by rolling the bottle of saline toward Kevin like a bowling ball. The round bottle went rolling along, then touched Kevin’s ankle and stopped. Next, I rolled the spray-type antiseptic.
Even though I was rolling the items over to him, Kevin didn’t so much as glance down to see what they were. He only watched my actions. The painkillers were something Kim Gayoung had brought from Yugeum’s lab; there were two tablets left, so I tossed the whole container. The bottle of painkillers flew lightly in an arc and landed beside Kevin’s instep.
From what I’d observed, most Koreans didn’t take pills without water, but foreigners just swallowed pills down. I didn’t really know why. Maybe I’d simply lived my life without seeing Koreans who swallowed pills dry. As for water to take the medicine with... he could scoop up some of the water being drained away and drink that. I drank it, and I was fine. Though if I had to drink that seawater, I’d rather swallow normal saline. It was saltwater either way.
I said something I would never, ever say to a patient in the clinic where I worked.
“Treat yourself.”
Without taking his eyes off me, Kevin groped around near his ankle and lifted the round bottle of saline toward me. Keeping both me and the saline bottle within his field of vision, he quickly checked the object in his hand, then set it down. He confirmed the antiseptic and painkillers in the same way.
Apparently, he believed that the moment he took his eyes off me, I would charge in, close the distance, and attack him—or the people keeping their distance from him would rush over and pounce. I had no idea why he believed that. Pointing at the medicine bottles with my finger, I said,
“Wash the wound over a wide area with the saline, then disinfect it with the antiseptic. If you take the painkillers, it’ll hurt less. Or don’t take them and keep hurting.”
I needed to see the wound with my own eyes to know what state it was in. I thought I had behaved well enough that, if I stood before Hippocrates, he wouldn’t kick me out. This is something that usually surprises people, but dentists take the Hippocratic Oath too. Still gripping the axe handle, Kevin frowned and asked,
“What did you say your name was?”
At his hoarse voice, I zipped up my backpack and asked the same question back.
“What’s your name, then?”
Behind me, I heard someone gasp. What if Yugeum was wrong, or you had a twin and he turned out to be someone else? Kevin looked at me with displeasure and spat out his name.
“...Kevin Roy.”
“Park Muhyeon.”
“Mr. Pak. There’s no guarantee you won’t attack me if I let go of the axe.”
“Keep thinking that, then.”
Kevin looked bewildered. Even if I told him that I was harmless, that I had no intention of hurting him, that I had no reason to attack him, and that if he allowed it, I would treat him—would he really believe me?
We had never met before, and the situation we had met in was too rough for us to trust each other at once. And while there had been countless times at the dental clinic when I soothed terrified children and treated them, what power did a doctor have when an adult said he didn’t want treatment? All I could say was something like, Please come if you decide you’d like to be treated. Besides, Deep Blue was closed, and I was on vacation.
“I don’t want to treat you while imagining you might bring that axe down on me, either.”
“What do you get out of this?”
Kevin’s words were so absurd that I smiled. Then, worried my smile might look like a sneer to him, I wiped it from my lips and asked back,
“Do you think there is anything?”
A deep crease formed between Kevin’s brows. Then, after a while, he sighed.
“If you don’t attack me first, I won’t attack you either.”
As soon as I heard that, I wanted to expand the scope of that promise a little.
“Do that for the others too. If the people here don’t attack you, then you don’t attack the people here.”
It wasn’t such a bad idea, was it? Those people probably didn’t want to keep being needlessly terrified while looking at you. You probably felt the same. Though I couldn’t make promises on behalf of everyone, so if you got attacked, you could attack back. Pretty fair, right? But Kevin shook his head.
“Only you. They haven’t done anything for me.”
I let out a deep sigh, then approached slowly with both hands raised. Then I slowly removed the towel wrapped around his calf. His calf had merely been bound tightly with a towel over the spot where something sharp had stabbed in deep and pulled out again.
No matter whether I looked at this ten times or a hundred, it seemed like it needed at least ten stitches. When I reached into my backpack while looking at his calf, Kevin was startled.
“What are you trying to do?”
“I’m going to take tape out of my backpack. I’m going to stop the bleeding and put tape over the wound.”
When I opened my backpack and moved the cat this way and that while searching for the item, Kevin’s expression turned strange at the sight of the contents inside. I poured saline over the wound, washed my fingers too, and pressed it down with gauze. After the bleeding had slowed somewhat, I poured saline over the wound again to rinse it, then disinfected the area around it.
“By any chance, is this wound from an axe?”
It was a wound in the fleshy part of his calf. Kevin didn’t answer. I pulled the torn, gaping wound together with my hands as much as possible, pressed the flesh against itself, and placed tape over it several times. To stitch it, I would need a needle and thread. For now, I just had to keep the wound from opening as much as possible. Kevin furrowed his brown brows and asked,
“What’s with the cat inside?”
“It’s not one I was raising, so I don’t know. ...Do you happen to know anything about snakes?”
“No.”
“Then sharks?”
“...Are you making fun of me?”
“No.”
What part of that sounded like I was making fun of him? Even after using up the little gauze and bandage I had, it still wasn’t enough, so I tore the towel I’d been using into long strips and wrapped them around his calf. Looking at Kevin’s leg, I asked,
“Ah. Right. What’s your religion?”
“Why religion?”
“Pray your leg gets better fast.”
“...I believed until yesterday. Starting today, I don’t have one.”
By the time the treatment was over, my hands were a complete mess. All I could think about was wanting to run to a bathroom immediately and wash my hands about five times. The brown eyes of the person staring holes into my face made me uncomfortable. Doctors were very used to patients staring at their faces because they had nowhere else to look, but since this wasn’t a clinic and the wound wasn’t inside a mouth, it felt twice as burdensome.
My face felt like it was burning, so I looked around and saw that the others had their arms crossed and were watching me treat him. ...Well, aside from the water draining away, there wasn’t much else to look at. Once the treatment was finished, I stood up and checked how high the water level was.
Looking down from the second-floor railing to the first floor, I saw that an enormous amount of water had drained away. Lee Jihyeon, who had been slumped in a chair, was getting up and coming toward the stairs. Kevin, gripping the axe handle again, slowly rose while leaning on the axe. People seemed to want to come toward the stairs leading to the first floor, but perhaps because Kevin was there, they were hesitating.
However, Lee Jihyeon didn’t care whether Kevin was holding an axe or not and passed right in front of him to go down the stairs. When Kevin slowly descended the stairs after Lee Jihyeon, people began going down while keeping two or three meters of distance.
On the first floor, the water level was somewhere between ankle and calf height. After rinsing my hands once in the seawater, I walked carefully so I wouldn’t fall and arrived at the elevator. The people who had already reached it were getting into the elevator with its doors open. The interior of the elevator was huge. As Lee Jihyeon, who had torn off the elevator panel, looked inside it, I entered the elevator and checked the capacity standard.
Passenger · Freight
3750 kg
50 persons
No wonder the elevator was big. Its capacity was enormous, wasn’t it? The inside was much larger than it looked from outside. The central elevator in the Central Building was huge too, but this one was no joke either. How many kilos per person was that based on? Yugeum was also looking at the capacity standard, and he said simply to me,
“That’s 75 kg per person.”
Hearing that, Kim Gayoung smiled faintly and said,
“First of all, I’m not 75 kg.”
Was the standard weight of one person in an elevator originally 75 kg? It was a subject I had never thought about in my daily life. There were twelve people here; couldn’t we all fit?
Around the time I was recalling the weight I’d measured most recently during the health checkup when I joined this place, Sam frowned at the “kg” and asked Yugeum,
“How much is that in pounds?”
“...Uh. One moment. ...Uh. About... 166 pounds?”
Sam fell silent. Then he stared at the capacity standard as if glaring at it might make the numbers change.
The woman named Emma was crumpled in the corner of the elevator, sitting on the floor. She didn’t seem to care at all that her legs and butt were getting wet. Unlike when she had seemed fine on the second floor, she now looked tremendously exhausted. I wanted to speak to her, but she was curled up as much as possible, covering her head with her hands and blocking out every outside stimulus. I didn’t want to deliberately bother someone who looked as if conversation itself would exhaust her.
As people boarded the elevator one by one, Benjamin asked Lee Jihyeon anxiously,
“Is it working? Or not?”
“Wait.”
“How long do we have to wait? I listened to you, dived down, and dragged the elevator out of the water.”
“I said wait.”
“If this doesn’t work! Huh! You’re the one killing everyone here! You’re killing them all! Everyone here could have gone to the Biology Center, but we trusted you and stayed!”
Lee Jihyeon lifted her head from the elevator panel and looked at Benjamin. But Kanu cut Benjamin off first and said,
“If it doesn’t work, we die here.”
“Sure, maybe it makes no difference to you whether you live or die here since your death day’s already been decided, but that’s not true for me!”
“Whether we leave by elevator or not, it’ll be about the same, so stop whining.”