Humans Yearn
That day, I handed him the coffee and went home.
And when the next day came, I found myself walking toward that apartment once more.
What are you supposed to do when you come face to face with someone who looks ready to give up on living?
It was the kind of problem most people would freeze over, if it were suddenly dropped in their lap. I'm no psychiatrist, so I don't know any proper medical methods. Going to a psych ward now to farm whatever books they might have lying around would be a joke besides.
But I did have something resembling experience.
There had been a me who endlessly contemplated jumping — even if it was only from a rooftop of four or five stories.
When I called up those memories, I couldn't deny it. The one who pulled me out of that bottomless pit of depression was Hyungjaedeul-ui Cyburger.
Hyungjaedeul-ui Cyburger.
No mom, no dad, no friends, and a monthly salary of 1.8 million won that couldn't put a dent in a hundred million won of debt. I was such a stupid bastard I didn't even know I could've just filed for personal bankruptcy. So the me of that time had thought of a little acquaintanceship with a fixed-handle ghost of the internet.
I figured he was the only human being I could ask to handle my funeral.
And then.
u dead?
don't die. gotta upvote.
From the next day on, messages like that came every single day.
u dead?
can't die. upvote my post.
I never answered once. He kept pinging me anyway.
u dead?
if you're alive upvote
Sent.
u dead?
freezing as hell today. upvote.
Sent.
u dead?
if you've got time to die hit the upvote first.
Sent again.
u dead?
sending a cyburger e-gift. upvote.
I ignored him for days on end. He kept sending them.
u dead?
if the cyburger's good upvote
He hammered my notifications like a man possessed.
u dead?
hmm.
He clung on so relentlessly that I forgot even the listless helplessness of lying there collapsed in depression.
The stars of the steppe flow through my soul.
More than two thousand years ago, on a distant western grassland, lived the brothers of my soul.
They took the earth as their floor and the sky as their roof, and they wandered until death without leaving a single record.
In an age so remote we can scarcely even guess at it, only a fragment of history left behind by the Greek Herodotus tells us that my brothers rode horses and thundered bravely across the steppe.
I've never told this to anyone.
Even now, after I fall asleep, I still ride the eternal grassland side by side with my brothers.
When I close my eyes, before long my vision fills with a horse's flying mane and a leather bridle ornamented in bronze.
When I grip the reins so I won't fall, the horse races forward as if treading upon the wind itself.
My brothers and I could be truly free on the steppe. Because the steppe was a primordial land that no one could invade.
The strongest men in this world. The great king who sought to ride to the ends of the earth at the head of his warriors. The master of kings who held the world in his arms. All of them could only set foot on the fringes of my brothers' land before they had to turn back.
And after riding like a madman, when I wake at dawn, my heart still pounds as if mimicking the hoofbeats of two thousand years ago, and my soul screams to be returned to that time filled with stars and wind.
But when that brief excitement ends, I am seized by a fear and sorrow I cannot express, and I weep like a child.
My brothers of two thousand years past, who loved the stars and were brothers of the wind and a people of gold, have now weathered away into time.
I was so sad that they had vanished. And because I did not want to vanish, I wept like a child.
That sorrow could be soothed by eating a Cyburger from Mom's Touch.
Everyone — my brothers still race through eternity inside an endless bridle.
To save them, you must buy Cyburgers in bulk.
Please. Help me.
you crazy bastard. just hold a funeral and tell me to die already, fuck.
In the end, as if in payment for how obsessively he'd jammed himself into my life — enough that even the thought of dying had evaporated — I had no choice but to send him a reply packed with profanity.
don't die. if you die i won't have any friends.
yeah. now i get why you don't have friends.
then at least upvote.
fuck off.
After that, I learned all too well that he was the kind of crazy bastard who'd ping me fifty times a day, every day.
A complete lunatic. An annoying human being. He was crazy, and he had a bit of that fellow-outcast, fellow-loner smell about him.
Anyway. What I was trying to say is... that sometimes a treatment method based on experience is more useful than medical knowledge.
Right. What matters is persistence and being a pain in the ass.
Poke at them so relentlessly that even the thought of suicide gets scattered. Make yourself such a nuisance they get thoroughly pissed off. That was the ambition I was declaring.
If the word fuck comes out of the mouth of someone who's lost the will to live, that's my victory.
In my experience, that seems to be what matters.
Let's go.
I yanked the door open and stepped inside.
There was the old man, looking up at me with the same vacant eyes as yesterday.
"I've brought some coffee and snacks."
"...Why again."
I sat down naturally in front of him as his face arranged itself into an expression of what is this, then pulled the snacks and coffee from my backpack and held them out.
"No particular reason. I've been lonely lately, being on my own."
"..."
The moment I unscrewed the thermos cap, a gentle warmth and a plume of white steam unfurled. The coffee smelled sweet and fragrant, the way it always did.
"I listened to your story yesterday, so perhaps today I'll tell you a bit of mine."
"...Do as you like."
I tore open a pack of crackers — the kind that go with instant mix-coffee — and, with coffee and cracker in my mouth, smiled in a way that wasn't like me at all.
I was going to save him.
The way the Orphanage Director had gathered me up. The way Hyungjaedeul-ui Cyburger had saved me. The way Harin had dragged me up out of hell.
I meant that I was going to save someone too.
"I don't have a mother or a father."
"..."
And of course, the opening move is the no-mom-no-dad declaration.
A declaration.
I am an orphan.
"I didn't lose them in this disaster. I was an orphan from the start. I grew up in a shabby, worthless orphanage halfway up Daldongne Slum Hill."
"...Must've been hard."
"Yes. I had a rough life of it. From elementary school through high school, I didn't have a single friend. I lived every day getting bullied and ostracized."
"..."
Unlike you, who'd at least had something for a little while, I was a pathetic bastard who'd lived with nothing the entire time.
Even someone who'd been born dangling precariously off a cliff, hanging on by his teeth, was still standing and moving forward now.
"Good memories... well. The memories from the orphanage were decent enough, in their way. The Director's hand on my head used to make a person go all drowsy and warm. He's already passed away now, though."
"...That's. Hmm. A regrettable thing."
"I cried quite a bit. Was depressed for a while, too."
He was looking at me with a face that seemed, somewhere along the way, to have fallen into the story.
The story was bitter, but the coffee was sweet.
"Having grown up through my entire school years without a single good memory, I went straight into the military. Being an orphan, I couldn't afford college."
"The military... where did you serve? I was in the Marines..."
Come again?
I shot to my feet at a knife-sharp angle and immediately fired off a class salute.
"PILSEUNG!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1218th CLASS, SIR!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"No.... uh.... I'm 827th."
"PIIIIIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SEUUUUNG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"No, wait, don't do that, just sit down first..."
"SIR!!!!!!!!!!"
I'm! Fucked!
Marine assei declaration!!!!
Once a Marine, always a Marine — even Motherless Cha, who used to say that, would have to fold a four-hundred-hand and sit this one out.
Hey, Motherless Cha. Help me!
Fuck off.
Even Motherless Cha, that great Marine and eternal senior, threw up both hands, both feet, and his dick besides.
Of course, the entire freakout was calculated.
I hadn't expected him to be a Marine veteran, but I needed to overturn that sagging, lifeless atmosphere. Being fellow Marines was a fine pretext for shaking him out of that drooping mood.
"How can a Marine let himself go this weak? I'm an orphan with a miserable school life who toughed it out in the Marines getting soccer-kicked, then ended up a hundred and thirty million won in debt from a Jeonse Fraud — a complete fuckup of a 1218th-class Marine — and I'm still living just fine like this."
"...No."
The angle for a full-blown shitshow had locked in.
"What do you mean, 'no'? Because there's a gap of nearly four hundred classes, are you saying the military I served in doesn't even count as the military?"
"You, just calm down a bit first..."
What I was performing now was the Dragoon Stance that Corporal Cha used to make me hold whenever he got bored.
"When my Marine senior has gone this soft, how is a junior supposed to calm down? That's not how I was taught, SIR!!"
"I get it, so... stop that weird thing you're doing..."
"SIR!!"
He'd made me do it once a day, saying there'd come a time I'd need it — and just as he'd said, the time had finally come.
Motherless Cha. Just how far ahead did you see?