Chapter 2 #2
No, there’s nothing going on. What I’m saying is, there’s too much nothing going on.
Usually something happens once or twice a day.
One person tries to escape, and one causes a disturbance, and one attempts suicide.
And usually someone throws ramen soup dregs or an egg at me.
But right now, the troublemakers are all so quiet they could be dead.
Is Professor Shim scheming something?
Before all this, Shim Yeongho was a professor of social welfare at Hanzhong University.
He developed symptoms on the very first day of the disaster and went straight into self-isolation.
From there he made a community for people infected with the East Sea Disease, and they communicated via Kakao Talk group chats and Daum message boards, Naver Band, and Telegram, zealously sharing information and encouraging the infected with promises they would get better soon.
I’ve heard that among themselves they call him “President Shim.”
You mustn’t say things like that. It’s thanks to his support, after all, that the villagers have been able to carry on all this time without a riot.
Professor Shim’s facial deformity was so serious that he could no longer talk, and I’d heard his fingers were so swollen he couldn’t type on a smartphone.
He spent all day in front of the computer in his room, typing slowly with his thick fingers, sending texts and posting on blogs and running the community.
And I heard he had an intense dislike for me.
It was unclear how Professor Shim was infected. He’d been making civil complaints here and there, saying that it’s time for the infected to be released from isolation. Communications to that effect frequently reached the police substation. What could be more absurd?
The sergeant went on.
Identification of the body that was found in Okgye Port is coming in today. It’s probably the last missing person we’re going to get. On top of being very decayed, the disease ruined the tooth alignment and even the fingerprints, so apparently it took a long time to get a result.
I was about to reply with Right, but something hot surged up my throat. Suffering invades the village regularly, through the smallest gaps. If I look up from my work, it’s always there, coiled, ready to attack.
What about my niece …
Things went quiet on the other end. A few times I saw him start to type a message, and each time it disappeared again. Sergeant Hyunjun was one of the few people who saw me break down like this.
I didn’t even get to see the body.
I know. It was a chaotic time. There were false reports that corpses spread the disease, and no one was in their right mind. It was election time too, so the administration was a mess. They wouldn’t act so rashly if it happened now.
I didn’t even get to see her body.
As soon as the lockdown is lifted, you can find where she’s buried and hold a proper funeral. Just sit tight. It has to end soon.
It’ll be over soon. I heard that line three years ago.
At first, we just thought it was like a bad cold.
When orders came from the government recommending everyone stay in the village for another week, Hyun pestered me to go out and see the sights.
She was so excited she was rolling on the floor.
Her parents said to obey the government, to come back when things had improved.
And then the disease broke out. After a few days I found spots all over Hyun’s body.
The hospital I took her to was chaos, packed with patients.
Within a few days visitors were banned. A few days after that, I was notified that she had died.
My older sister ranted and raved for days on end, howling that I had killed her baby.
And then, at some point, after hurling a barrage of curses like she always did, she gave a deep sigh and said, “Well, in one way, it was fortunate. If I’d been the one to take her to Haewon, who knows, her dad and I might have caught the disease too… ”
I felt a surge of nausea and hung up. We never contacted each other again.
Every night, my mind returns to Cheongnyangni Station. I imagine catching hold of Hyun’s small hand as she races off. I imagine talking her down, reasoning with her.
“Something’s not right, Hyun. Let’s call home first and get on the next train. Let’s play in the station for another hour.”
“Something’s not right. We can take a trip together anytime we want. Let’s go home today.”
“Something’s not right. Let’s change our tickets. We can go to the neighboring town. It’s really pretty there too.”
“Something’s not right…”
Something’s not right …
When I got to the beach a salty, rotting smell pricked at my nose.
It was a familiar stench, but at the beach it became another level of awful.
The air here is so rotten it clings. Mountains of fish carcasses have washed up on the shore.
Piled in layer after layer, the fish press down on each other and putrefy, turning into mush from the bottom up.
In the beginning, the villagers cleared the fish away somewhat, but now it’s too much to handle.
There are also countless fish flopping about, life still in them.
After Haewon Port became a swamp of death, the fish that happened to drift into the bay couldn’t get out, as though they’d been caught in a net.
After circling around endlessly they must have felt so stifled.
Must have decided it would be better just to come up onto the beach and end it.
Well, that’s one way to explain it. One night I awoke from a nightmare and rushed, out of my mind, up Dawn Road in my pajamas.
I clamored at the roadblock, shouting at the soldiers on guard that I was going home.
I was quickly apprehended and taken back to the village.
That night I lay face down among the dead fish on the beach and cried until morning.
Flocks of white birds cover the fish like a quilt, greedily pecking at their flesh.
All around, plastic trash is piled as high as the dead fish.
The plastic gets bumped around in the waves, breaks apart, and is worn down into small pebbles, and then the birds eat it, and the corpses of birds full of plastic pile up along with everything else.
The birds were sick too. The herring gulls of Haewon Village had unusually big, red eyes, and patches where feathers were missing. There were some that couldn’t fly because the joints in their wings had bent out of shape.
As I looked out at the black craggy island backed by the sunrise, I was unconsciously scratching my forearm.
It was bumpy with hives, reddened by my scraping nails.
I looked through the sea mist to the dark cloud billowing at the rocky outcrop.
Every time I see that cloud I am seized by fear.
As far as I understand it, the dark cloud is formed when the rising air current from the blocked-off bay meets with cold air in the morning and evening.
On the internet, people share memes about devil sightings on the rocky island.
The villagers don’t go anywhere near the island. Most of the fishing boats in the village were smashed up in the maelstrom, but even families whose boats are still intact avoid the island and its shallowed waters, swirling torrents, and strong winds.
How long had I been sitting there like that? On Sunrise Road, a bus coated in dust sputtered its way along the coastline to a bus stop.
All the routes into the village were cut off, but that bus still drove its route inside the village twice a day, morning and evening, and took those with important business to the border of the village and back.
Getting off, I saw the village secretary who would go from house to house doing errands for people, and an old lady stooped low under a big bundle of spring vegetables, probably wages for day labor on a farm. And after them … I doubted my eyes.
An unfamiliar man sprung off the bus. He was a long way off, but I could tell he was clean and well turned-out, taking energetic steps into the village.