At first, the people had been frightened, but now I could hear the sounds of them sprawling throughout the darkened elevator or sighing. Even thrashing about in terror within the pitch-black darkness seemed to become somewhat tolerable with time.
I heard James cackle toward Sam, who was beside him.
“Jesus has forsaken you.”
“Shut up!”
“He could’ve abandoned you on the surface, but He must have disliked you an awful lot to dump you here.”
Sounds of the two of them roughly patting each other echoed from the darkness. I twisted the flashlight handle and pointed it back at the ceiling. When I glanced toward I Jihyeon, she was praying with her eyes closed. Kevin stared blankly at I Jihyeon, then gazed vacantly around the elevator interior. Logan spoke to Gim Gayeong and Yu Geumi, who were whispering together.
“Ladies.”
Gim Gayeong looked around. Realizing that the only women gathered nearby were herself and Yu Geumi, she turned to stare at Logan.
“Tell us something interesting. Anything.”
Gim Gayeong let out a hollow laugh as if exasperated, rolling her shoulders in a broad stretch as she spoke.
“You putting me on storytelling duty?”
“Anything’s fine. Even what you two were saying to each other earlier.”
“Wouldn’t it be too cruel for men to hear?”
“I don’t know about the others, but I’m a man’s man, so I’m fine. Women gather together whispering and laughing all the time, right? You’re laughing because it’s an interesting story, aren’t you?”
Gim Gayeong yawned in the darkness, then stretched her legs out wide while remaining seated. She bent forward, folding her body completely in half as she spoke.
“They say if you fall to your death in an elevator, the corpse turns into total mincemeat.”
“...What?”
“Geumi said that if you fall from this height, your flesh, bones, and liver all shatter into pieces so tiny you couldn’t put them back together. She said you’d end up like vomited kimchijeon. You know, that Korean food like pizza from the vegetarian restaurant in Jungang-dong. She said you become human blood porridge, like someone threw that up.”
Yu Geumi nodded vigorously as if backing up Gim Gayeong’s words. Logan’s expression, mouth hanging blankly open, did not look well. Gim Gayeong lifted her chin toward the ceiling as she continued.
“And if you die at a seabed this deep, apparently the body decomposes and disappears incredibly fast. What, what did you call it again?”
When Gim Gayeong asked, Yu Geumi let out a big yawn before answering.
“Sea lice. Sea lice.”
“Ah. Right. They say thousands or tens of thousands of sea bugs and parasites swarm out and tear all the flesh off? So the skin and flesh start decomposing at a staggering speed. And crustaceans like shrimp or crabs go crazy trying to burrow into the nostrils or mouth to devour the internal organs. Fish will tear off every soft bit of flesh like eyeballs and lips, and all sorts of marine creatures come swimming from afar, saying there’s a famous feast here.”
Logan grimaced as he listened. Sam and James had stopped patting each other with fists and forearms and were now listening to Gim Gayeong’s story. Carter and Benjamin, sitting far away pretending not to listen, seemed no different. Gim Gayeong lowered her voice grimly.
“They say a corpse in the ocean becomes a skeleton in as little as three or four days, or a week at most. Then it sinks cleanly to the seafloor with only bones remaining, staying a skeleton for about three or four years.”
Does skeletonization happen that fast in the deep sea? When the police found my father’s half-skeletonized corpse, several years had already passed.
“You remain in that exact shape and form until some rude fish bumps your bones with its fins, or some waddling crab brushes them with its short legs. And thanks to that one decomposed corpse, tens of millions of marine creatures on the seafloor absorb nutrients, use it as shelter, and sustain their lives.”
“...It tugs at my heart. Ah. It’s so beautiful.”
Yu Geumi pretended to wipe tears with the back of her hand. Gim Gayeong looked at Logan, whose face seemed like he was about to throw up.
“The cycle of life. Isn’t it an interesting and moving story?”
“...Do women really tell each other stories like that?”
“Then what story would you tell in this situation? Hair care? Pedicures?”
Gim Gayeong was one step away from making Logan cry. Logan, his face scrunched up, spoke in a thoroughly foul mood.
“Why are you smiling and telling stories like that as if it’s fun!”
“What do you care whether I laugh or not!”
Logan furrowed his brows at Gim Gayeong’s snarling tone, then turned his head and looked at me beside him as if fleeing.
“Uh...what was your name again?”
Memorize it. I remembered your name right away. It’s not like my name is difficult. It’s easy to pronounce. ...Wait, but am I the next one?
“I’m Bak Muhyeon. I don’t have any talent for telling interesting stories either.”
“Tell us whatever.”
Then he looked at Gim Gayeong and Yu Geumi before adding to me:
“Make it something hopeful and fun.”
Uh...an interesting story. Something fun and hopeful in this situation. I was sure I’d heard something about elevators.
“They say the probability of dying in a plane crash is extremely low. But apparently, the probability of dying while riding an elevator is much, much lower than that. That’s why we ride planes and elevators. Because the possibility of death is low. The probability of dying in an elevator fall is lower—far lower than one in ten million.”
As I spoke, the eyes of everyone in the elevator were fixed on me.
“So if the elevator we are riding were to fall, it would mean overcoming staggering odds that you would never encounter twice in a lifetime. ...If any of you survive, buy a lottery ticket. You never know, you might win.”
As I, a timid person, smiled sheepishly and fumbled to a close, people sighed, chuckled lightly, or seemed unimpressed.
“Ha.”
Whether out of boredom or because enduring the silence in the darkness was difficult, Logan looked at I Jihyeon, who was praying, like a snickering hyena, then turned his head to stare at Emma sitting in the corner.
“By any chance.”
“I don’t have any hopeful stories!”
“Uh....”
“From the start, our generation itself is like flowers that bloomed by mistake in the dead of winter. We are sprouts that grew toward the outside, deluded into thinking spring had arrived just because one or two days were miraculously less cold amid a hundred and twenty days of winter. Like rabbits or squirrels that foolishly crawled outside because it was slightly warm, catching heavy snowflakes, trembling in the cold, starving, and then having to spend their entire lives back in dark, cold burrows!”
“...W-why are you so negative!”
“We’re trapped in a powerless elevator—does this look positive to you!”
When Emma snapped at him nervously, Logan immediately shut his mouth. Then he turned his head completely toward the side opposite Emma. Skipping over I Jihyeon, who was still praying, he looked toward Kevin.
When Kevin, arms crossed and leaning against the elevator wall behind him, met Logan’s gaze, he turned away too. When Logan turned toward Kanu, Kanu looked at him with sleepy eyes and asked:
“What. Want me to tell a story?”
“...Hah. No.”
“I do have an interesting story. A hopeful one, too.”
“You saw me get royally fooled by several people just now, right? It has to be truly hopeful and interesting.”
Kanu looked around at the people who were unconsciously listening in and spoke with a smile.
“Did you know there was a survivor from the Planet Project?”
This was the first I’d heard of a survivor. It was a large-scale space project from before the undersea base.
“You mean the base they built on Mars that got destroyed after ten years, killing about eight thousand two hundred people? I thought all space-related projects except the Moon Project got scrapped because of that.”
Logan’s knowledge was similar to mine. There had been a time when it was fashionable among the world’s wealthy to go to Mars, back when the undersea base had barely managed to take the shape of a building underwater.
“Officially, yes. Unofficially, one woman from Haiti survived. She survived without major injuries, and because she was sending distress signals from an escape pod, she drifted for fifteen days until a rescue ship picked up the signal and saved her.”
How did he know that? Was this story real? Was he another conspiracy theorist? Such thoughts sprang up, but I put them aside for later and asked what I was most curious about first.
“Why is it unofficial?”
“Because judging from what she says, she’s completely out of her mind. And all the elite geniuses, PhDs, famous celebrities, and politicians died, but exactly one person survived. And to top it off, she was a third-world contract worker hired solely for being healthy and diligent, who only did menial tasks.”
Kanu spoke indifferently.
“Moreover, her radiation exposure was so severe that she was scheduled to be replaced at the base after two weeks. It was a position where they made workers do trivial, labor-intensive tasks under the guise of ‘rear support’ for elite personnel, recruited them in the name of career-building while paying them paltry wages as if doing them a favor, exposed them to radiation up to the limit, and rotated them out continuously. Wealthy first-world countries used to exploit those people as slaves in colonies; now they hire them under the banner of overseas job creation, use them up, and discard them. And in the case of women, they’re more vulnerable to radiation than us men.”
Where exactly was the fun and hope in this story? Listening to it, it was nothing but the horrific job market of the twenty-first century. If she was young enough to have no choice but to endure such unfair treatment, she was probably barely out of school. ...Damn. It reminds me of my younger sibling.
“People dismissed the things she ranted about as delirium caused by oxygen deficiency and nitrogen poisoning. And since the company that hired her went bankrupt, plus she was charged enormous rescue and medical fees, she had to flee the U.S. like a fugitive. But a very few people paid attention to the story she told. On the day the Mars base Ares was blown to cosmic dust, she alone succeeded in surviving through dozens upon dozens of repeated deaths and the experience accumulated from them. She’s still alive. The shock turned all her hair white, but she’s living healthily.”
It felt as though an icy hand were reaching out from the darkness and gripping the back of my neck. With chills running from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, I looked at Kanu, who spoke with perfect composure.