“Surim-ssi? What’s wrong?”
“Ah… Manager Lee Myeongho…”
“No, why have you become half a person since coming back from lunch?”
“My stomach’s a bit off…”
Surim awkwardly answered Lee Myeongho, who was following behind him, as he entered the break room. Lee Myeongho followed him in again and asked.
“What did you eat?”
“Just, salad.”
“Should I get you some medicine?”
“There’s medicine in the office?”
“Yeah. There should be a first-aid box in that cabinet over there… I’ll get you some digestive medicine.”
Surim hastily stopped Lee Myeongho.
“No. There’s nothing left to digest anyway.”
“Hmm… Then what should we do?”
“Don’t worry. My stomach’s just a bit queasy, that’s all.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
Lee Myeongho watched Surim take out apple juice from the refrigerator and pour it into a glass, then asked cautiously.
“We were planning to have a company dinner this Friday as a welcome party for you—will you be able to come? Should we postpone the date?”
“A welcome party? That’s fine…”
“Should we postpone it?”
“Um… no. It’s only Tuesday. I’ll be better by Friday.”
He had to get better. If he wasn’t better by then, it would mean there was a really serious problem.
Surim nodded his head, pushing his anxiety aside.
Fortunately, after drinking the apple juice, his stomach wasn’t queasy and he didn’t feel like throwing up.
* * *
White porridge. Pajeon. Dubu kimchi. Curry. Soy sauce rice. Vegetable sticks. Hummus and pita bread.
These were the foods Surim had tried eating after coming home. No matter what food he chewed and ate, Surim’s stomach wouldn’t accept it. The only thing that stayed down in his stomach was beverages.
When he chewed and ate vegetable sticks, he threw up, but when he ground them in a blender and drank them, he was fine, so it was certain.
“Ah, I’m going to die…”
Surim, who had already thrown up eight times just today, collapsed exhausted onto the dining table. He couldn’t understand what on earth was happening. Not being able to chew and eat anything. And he had been perfectly fine until just a few days ago, but suddenly.
“What about the company dinner…?”
Company dinners were already an uncomfortable event for Surim. Because he was an unintentional vegetarian, and company dinners usually meant time spent eating meat and meat and meat. Especially in places like this research lab where there were few women, it was even more so. If you sat at a table where pork belly was being grilled and just chewed on lettuce and rice, you were bound to hear something about it. In college, there were even people who tried to force him to eat meat.
But now one more problem had been added to that. No matter what he ate at the company dinner, it was obvious Surim would soon be running to the bathroom to throw up. Even if he tried not to make it obvious, it was dizzying to think about what people would think of the guest of honor at a dinner who went to the bathroom once every thirty minutes. And every time he came back, his eyes would even be bloodshot.
He didn’t want to show that side of himself to his company colleagues. But he couldn’t skip out on a company dinner where he was the guest of honor either.
How did it end up like this? Actually, it wasn’t that nothing came to mind.
Back then, if he hadn’t gone to receive the delivery food. If he had stayed by his side the whole time, couldn’t he have discovered that something was wrong with hyung sooner? Then wouldn’t hyung not have died? So, hyung died because of me…
“No.”
Surim cut off the thoughts that were rushing in an absurd direction. There had been a device measuring his pulse fitted on hyung’s finger. So the time it took for the medical staff to notice something was wrong with hyung probably wouldn’t have been much different whether Surim was there or not.
“…Still, I wish I could have at least been by his side at the end…”
Wouldn’t hyung have been less lonely then?
The moment he thought that, tears fell down along the corners of his eyes with a plop.
Surim sat up in surprise. He hadn’t even felt like crying, so why were tears coming out? As he pulled out a tissue to wipe away the tears welling up in his eyes, Surim rolled his eyes in bewilderment.
Something was strange.
After a moment of silence, Surim opened a map app and searched for psychiatric hospitals near his home. There was a psychiatric hospital not far away.
* * *
To confirm what equipment was currently in Research Lab 0, he had to look for everything with his own eyes. It wasn’t that there was no document organizing how many printers there were, or how many monitors and computers there were, but it was because it hadn’t been updated at all since four years ago.
Surim decided to update this document for now. He decided to manage them by numbering each piece of equipment as was usually done.
The first thing to do was to figure out the quantity and type of each piece of equipment.
“There’s one of these bat plushies here too.”
He hadn’t seen them on the first day, but palm-sized bat plushies were placed here and there around the office. There was definitely a bat otaku among the researchers.
Eight so far. There really were quite a lot.
Surim drew a bat on one side of his notebook and marked eight tally marks next to it, then giggled. He had no intention of including them in the equipment list, but they were cute so he was just going to leave them as they were.
At first, he had worried about what to do with these bat plushies that were clearly personal items. He wondered if it was okay to leave things like this in cabinets storing company items or on ownerless desks. But after postponing his decision for now and examining the office more, a few plushies weren’t the problem. After encountering several bizarre objects in bizarre places, the bat plushies were nothing.
For example, Erlenmeyer flasks and suspicious reagent bottles placed in the break room cupboard, or a swim tube stored in the cabinet for supplies, or a snowman stored in the freezer. The snowman especially—he couldn’t understand at all who had put it in the freezer, when, or why.
Surim shook his head and wrote down the name of the game console in the lounge in his notebook.
“PlayStation… is that right?”
Surim scratched his temple with the tip of his ballpoint pen as he looked at the Nintendo Switch, seeming troubled. Could he just roughly call it a game console and move on? After pondering for a moment, Surim bent down and turned the game console over.
After barely confirming that the game console was a Nintendo Switch, not a PlayStation, and writing it in his notebook, Surim was standing up when he spotted a familiar face in the break room across the way.
‘It’s Song Hanyeong.’
Song Hanyeong was standing in front of the coffee machine. After brewing his coffee strong three times again today, Song Hanyeong picked up his mug and was about to leave the break room when he stopped and checked his phone. Song Hanyeong’s expression crumpled severely as he read through something. He took a sip of coffee, then put the cup in the sink as it was and left the break room with quick steps.
Something must have happened.
Surim stayed quiet, not wanting to get in the way, then slipped into the break room. The mug Song Hanyeong had left behind was still full of coffee.
‘I want to try it.’
Of course, he knew it wouldn’t taste particularly different from the coffee he got from the coffee machine. But hadn’t it been coffee that Song Hanyeong’s lips had touched? Surim felt an intense impulse.
However, Surim didn’t follow the impulse. With trembling hands, Surim poured the coffee into the sink and washed the mug clean.
“Right, I can’t give up on being human.”
“What does that mean?”
“Ack…!”
Surim jumped and turned around. Lee Myeongho appeared at the entrance of the break room, chewing on a cream rice cake and looking at Surim with strange eyes.
“What’s wrong? Did you commit a crime or something?”
“N-no. I was just startled…”
“What’s with saying you can’t give up on being human?”
“It’s nothing.”
“You say everything’s nothing.”
“It really is nothing.”
Surim quickly fled from the break room to escape the suspicious gaze. He hadn’t done anything worth being suspicious about. He had almost done something, but he’d held back. So there was nothing to feel guilty about, yet his heart was pounding so hard he couldn’t stand it.
He realized he had inadvertently taken Song Hanyeong’s mug with him only after he sat down at his seat.
* * *
“Stupid Jin Surim…”
Surim gripped his forehead with both hands, placing the mug he’d stolen from the research lab on the dining table.
He really hadn’t meant to do this. He had just thought about maybe putting his lips where Song Hanyeong’s lips had been, but it felt too perverted so he had firmly held back.
After that, it felt too wasteful somehow… so in the end, when he came to his senses, the mug was inside his bag. He hesitated, thinking he might get a strange misunderstanding if caught trying to take it back out, and before he knew it, it was time to leave work, and he ended up bringing it all the way home.
“No. At this rate, I’m really going to become an active stalker…”
Surim squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. It was all Song Hanyeong’s fault. He had absolutely no intention of being like this, but he couldn’t control himself because the sensation of when Song Hanyeong touched the nape of his neck kept coming to mind.
His heart had already been pounding, so happy and excited just to meet him, but then suddenly touching someone else’s nape—how could a person not spin around?
“I was just going to watch from afar…”
But Song Hanyeong had pressed the switch. It felt as if the hot heat that arose when Song Hanyeong touched the nape of his neck had struck some part inside his head hard. At that moment, it was like a spark created by striking flint remained alive, and from time to time it fell on tinder, and the blazing heat that flared up engulfed Surim.
Surim wanted to cling to that small, hot warmth. He knew it was meaningless warmth, and in fact, it wasn’t even his share of heat.
