FOOL Ch 1

Chapter 1. Homosapiens

Pneumonia.

The troublesome and heavy homosapien needed to be hospitalized for a while.

That day, I threw him over to my maternal uncle’s private hospital and went home. I turned away from him the first day, but I ultimately did what I had to do anyway. A few days later, my uncle called me, and I felt irritated throughout the entire drive. Annoying incidents persisted one after another in my life, which I attempted to navigate while avoiding things that deviated from the expected. The man, who regained consciousness after two days, claimed he didn’t have an identification card. When asked if it had been expunged, he said that he never had one in the first place.

I was dumbfounded. He had both hands stretched above his bed, sleeping soundly with his mouth wide open. It made me question whether this was truly the same person who had just come back from the brink of death. He had a youthful face. He looked to be in his early twenties at most.

Anger welled up within me as I observed the quiet rise and fall of his chest. The foreign matter that intruded on my lethargic tranquillity, my depressing everyday life.

I contemplated waking him before grabbing a chair and sitting by the window. The sky, no longer raining, lit up the world in colours I hated. The sun poked its head through the slowly dissipating clouds. I wanted to hold a rain summoning ritual.

How did I come to hate the sun?

Even then, I didn’t sympathize with or take pity on myself. Every once in a while, I would just feel curious out of the blue. Why did I become such a human being? I didn’t really like myself, but I didn’t consider myself pitiful either. And I didn’t feel like dying or anything of that sort. There was no reason for me to cling onto life, but there was no reason for me to die, either. I was living my own way. I was living, one way or another, grappling with the memories that haunted me, so how come such a bothersome human being fell face first right in front of my house?

We met during the summer season, but his existence was as sudden as a sprout pushing its head through the frozen ground of a winter garden.

“Has the rain stopped?”

His voice was cheerful for someone whose condition wasn’t so good. I didn’t want to make eye contact with him, but there was no helping it, so I turned back. The man lightly clenched his two fists and raised his arms, yawning wide enough to split his mouth. He looked back and forth between the scenery beyond the window and my face before breaking into a broad smile.

The smiling face of that human being, who had thrown me into such a flurry, soaked in sweat and rain, was so innocent that it made me laugh for a moment. Shouldn’t he be thanking me for saving him first before asking if the rain stopped? It felt a little refreshing; I never knew there could be such a funny person out there. I felt that, rather than shameless, he seemed more foolish or innocent. I didn’t want to mock him.

It was so absurd that it left me flustered, words jumbling in my mouth that I couldn’t seem to organize. Just as I struggled to decide what to address first, a tray containing gruel and dried pollack soup was placed in front of the man. He jumped up, wriggling his hips as he sat, and took position while staring at the tray with a combative look in his eyes. My attention shifted to his hand, grabbing the spoon in a peculiar manner.

“Wow, hospital food is so good.”

The thought that popped into my head as I stepped closer and watched him eat was, “What an appetite. Had he been starving this entire time?” He had been unconscious for a few days, so it was right to say that he had been starving the entire time. He emptied the tray clean, as if he was never going to eat again, and stuck his tongue out to lick the plate while continuing to keep his eyes on me. The light colour of his eyes dazzled mine as I stared back at him. While he was licking the tray, I composed my thoughts on what to say next.

“I heard you said that you didn’t have an identification card.”

Having my hand suddenly grabbed was not the answer I was looking for.

“Don’t bite them. There’s blood on your lips.”

I looked down at my hand. There was blood beneath my fingernails, which couldn’t get shorter than they already were. There was no way the idiot—or mentally deranged human being—before me would know how bothersome it would be to say, “This is your fault, and what you should be concerning yourself with right now is answering my basic questions, not my fingernails.”

“What’s your name?”

“My hyungs¹ call me Hanggu².”

The place where ships come and go. I surmised he was from near the harbour.

“How many brothers do you have?”

“I don’t have any brothers.”

“You just said your hyungs.”

“I don’t have any family. They’re hyungs that I know.”

The various injuries and scars, large and small, and slightly aged bruises peeking out from beneath his patient uniform caught my attention. It wasn’t any of my business how he got hurt.

The hospital room was bright, and the eyes that met mine were dazzling; it slowly started to distress me. All I wanted to do was flee home as quickly as possible. I was in the middle of contemplating my next words when he opened his mouth first.

“In the morning, the kind elderly doctor told me I’d have to stay for about two weeks. Does that mean I’ll have to pay the hospital bills in two weeks?”

“…I believe he was referring to the period of time you’ll have to be administered antibiotics, including the period of hospitalization.”

His unusually coloured eyes shook. Something clicked in my brain.

“You don’t have any money?”

“I don’t. I had a stash, but… anyway, I don’t have any right now.”

“What about relatives or friends? You don’t have any friends?”

“Friends… I don’t know if they consider me a friend. But they don’t have any money either.”

There’s the answer. He lacked the means to pay the hospital bill. I didn’t want to know about the circumstances of others, and there was even less of a reason for me to continue looking at his face, smiling brightly as he spoke such lonely and hopeless words. Everything would’ve been over if I just went and told my uncle that I would cover the hospitalization fees and handed the man a few fifty thousand won bills from my wallet, then made my escape from the annoying situation. If only he hadn’t acted so unexpectedly.

“Are the hospitalization fees expensive? Should I pay it back by cleaning the hospital? Or is there anything that needs fixing in the hospital? I’m good at work. I have a good sense of work too.”

After saying that, he quickly got off the bed, and before I could even stop him, the ignorant owner of that hand pulled the needle from the back of it.

“What are you doing? You can’t just pull that out all of a sudden!”

“My fever has gotten better. Like this, I can work right away.”

“That’s for the doctor to decide. Pneumonia can even lead to death if not treated properly. Just take a look at the back of your hand.”

“Woah, woah! Why is there so much blood coming from this tiny hole?”

The blood spurting from the back of his hand soaked his patient’s uniform. Surprised, he stared at me with wide eyes.

I didn’t want to touch him. But it was human instinct. Much like when I had carried him to my car, stepping on the gas pedal like a madman. I used my palm to cover and apply pressure to the back of his hand. He stumbled, and his chin touched my shoulder. He felt warm. His wheezing breaths weren’t due to his sound sleep, but because of his fever.

What’s up with that? What did it matter if blood trickled down the hand of an annoying being—a complete and utter stranger—and what did it matter if his body felt warm? The line I had drawn, declaring us as strangers, as nothing more than members of the same species as humans, began to blur little by little. I grabbed his other hand, guiding him to apply pressure to the back of his own, and called for a nurse.

Because he was bleeding, and his body felt warm. Because on the first day, I had left, pretending not to know. Because he had no identification card, no parents, no siblings, and no friends. Suddenly, everything became a reason and sunk its weight onto me—someone who couldn’t be any lighter. I slowly began to resent whatever was making me feel this weight.

I stood with my arms crossed, like a picture frame mounted on the wall. I watched as he changed his patient’s uniform. He appeared to be in his mid- to late-180s, and although he had a large frame, he looked thin, with his ribs protruding. His sun-kissed skin had a slight sheen to it, with a good deal of scars scattered across its surface. Honestly, it was surprising. The scar beneath his ribcage seemed to be a surgical one, but if not, it was too big to be any normal injury, perhaps a knife wound.

Once I became aware of it, I could hear his coarse breathing even from a distance. Having finally changed patient uniforms, he wore a smile on his mouth, but a troubled look could be glimpsed in his eyes.

I had never seen such an expression before. People would usually call it a complicated expression, but it was more accurate to say that his was complex. His eyes were so clearly crying, so why was he smiling? I was amazed at how he could make such an expression feel natural.

“It might be tough to get back to work right away. I used to be able to do a lot of work even with this level of fever, though. I guess I’ve gotten weaker.”

“The body temperature you feel and your actual temperature can be different. Besides, we’re currently in the process of bringing down your fever through various treatments, so heed the doctor’s advice.”

“Wouldn’t taking aspirin or Tylenol help reduce the fever? Why does it keep coming back?”

He must’ve heard that he was suffering from pneumonia, so where did all his common sense go? Despite being so ignorant, his way of speaking wasn’t flippant. He seemed to be a character made up of combinations of feelings that didn’t quite fit together.

“You need to use antibiotics for the inflammation in your lungs, not fever reducers. The fever will persist until the inflammation completely settles.”

“Why does inflammation occur in the lungs?”

Do I look like a doctor? I felt like I was grabbing a toddler by the arms and explaining things to it.

“When the lungs become infected with bacteria, viruses, or fungi for a variety of reasons, inflammation occurs,”

“Wow, you’re really smart. It must be nice knowing so many things.”

If it weren’t for his cheerful voice and eyes looking at me in admiration, as well as his mouth open wide in surprise, I might’ve misunderstood his words as mockery and sarcasm. However, his eyes, completely taken with my shallow and superficial common sense, shone towards me with not a drop of negative emotion within them.

The man was harmless. I couldn’t find any semblance of malice in him. It wasn’t any of my business, but that was how I felt. To put it nicely, that was what he was like, but in other words, he seemed to be the stupid type.

“Anyway, don’t worry about the hospital bill. Just take good care of yourself and get discharged.”

“I’ll definitely pay it back. Even if I have to do it in installments, I’ll pay it back.”

“Nevermind that. Goodbye, then.”

“Are you leaving?”

I glanced back.

He was standing on his knees, like a meerkat. Yeah, exactly like a meerkat. He watched me, maintaining that very position atop the bed, and asked if I was leaving. Yet another weird expression. His eyebrows twitched, and unlike the first time, his eyes were smiling, but the corners of his lips were tilted downward. Of course I’m leaving, what else is there left for me to do here?

“Yes. I’m leaving.”

“Uh… Could you hug me, just this once?”

I doubted my ears, wondering if I had heard correctly. I was uncertain at first, but now I thought that he was definitely not in his right mind.

At the same time that thought crossed my mind, my steps turned towards him, as if possessed. His face, arms spread wide as I approached, went into full bloom. Surely, something had possessed me in that moment. I embraced him, and he hugged me back. I heard the sound of a sob beside my ear. It was a sound that stabbed my heart like a jagged stone, neither dispersing nor filtering out.

“Thank you for hugging me.”

The crazy man seemed more grateful for the hug than for saving his life, I thought. I heard a choked voice, but when I looked, I saw an innocent smile on his face, leaving me at a loss for how to react. I gave him a light nod and left the hospital room. I felt strange. It was an uncomfortable feeling, as if I had done something subtly, ever so ambiguously mean to a good child.

Leaning against the door, I mouthed to my uncle, who was in the midst of treating a patient, to give me a call, and then returned home. In the early evening, my phone rang. He said that he seemed to be regularly getting assaulted, was suffering from malnutrition, and other stuff—stuff I wouldn’t usually care about. But when I learned that the large scar on his body was from renal surgery, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten all about the money I had gone there to give him. I was also bothered by the fact that he wouldn’t have any decent clothes to wear once he was discharged.

Why did I feel the weight of his life? Was it because I was curious about his strange expressions? Where did it all start? Even as I retraced my steps, I couldn’t quite figure it out.

-Should we file a police report?

“Don’t report it. I’ll go back to the hospital tomorrow.”

-If it’s too much stress for you, I’ll take care of it.

“No, it’s okay. I’ll see you tomorrow, Uncle.”