Gas Poisoning
— KRA-BOOOOM!! BR-R-R-RAT-AT-AT!! FWSSHHHHHH!!
It was closer to a disaster than any sound a human body ought to make. The studio's paper-thin walls shuddered as if they themselves had hit a climax, and the floor beneath the vinyl groaned like something in pain. Smack in the center of a blast that had been packed down and stoppered for two full weeks sat, of all things, my face.
"Hnnghh! Ghk— haaah!"
Noona snapped her back into a bow and forced out a noise that couldn't decide whether it was a moan. What slammed in after it was a rush of hot vapor no eye could see: biochemical gas, aged out of protein shakes, boiled eggs, and stress-soured stomach acid.
Kehuk?!
I'd been waiting on the usual faintly sweet fart from Seoyeon-noona. The world in front of my eyes went white.
— Prrrrrt! Ponk!
The aftershocks kept coming, but my mind was already being flung somewhere out past the atmosphere.
This isn't— kehuk?!
Thud.
I looked it up later. Medically speaking, it is impossible for a person to pass out from the smell of a fart alone. But I was in that room, and I am certain of it: I went down because the gas was poison. Vicious, undiluted poison.
"Hah! Kang Minchul!! You okay?! Open your eyes!!"
Smack! Smack—!
The feeling of my face being slapped without mercy snapped my eyes open, but my body wouldn't move. Sleep paralysis. I couldn't twitch a finger, and the stink of rotten eggs was still circling inside my nose.
"Ha— Lord above, he's not breathing! What the hell is this, is he actually dead?!"
Seoyeon-noona's voice was halfway out of her body. She was straddling my stomach with her face smeared in tears and snot.
"You said you were fine! You said you'd take all of it! So what am I supposed to do if you take it and die, you moron!!"
The hands that had been cracking my cheeks stacked together and started driving down on my chest. A fitness trainer's strength behind them.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
"Kehuk?!"
A blow that felt like it would powder my ribs punched a strangled groan out of me. Noona didn't even hear it. She was alone in a full panic, raising hell.
"911! No— am I crazy?! If I call 911, what am I even supposed to say? That I let out such a toxic fart the guy next door collapsed? Tomorrow the news'll run it in letters the size of a barn door: 'Female Trainer in Her Twenties Knocks Out Young Neighbor with a Fart'! What happens to my life then, waaah!"
Noona tore at her hair and stamped her feet. I'd only just clawed my mind back by wiggling my toes, and the sight of her nearly made me laugh. Her one-woman show wasn't over.
"I don't know— I gotta do mouth-to-mouth! Please just live, you pervert bastard!!"
Face grim, she caught my jaw and tipped it up. Then she pinched my nose shut and pressed her tear-wet lips straight down onto mine.
Mmph—?!
Soft.
Hot breath pushed into my mouth a second later, and after it a strange taste—her particular scent tangled with the lingering trace of what had just happened. In any case, they were the first woman's lips to touch mine in twenty-four years of living.
"Pwah! Breathe. Please, just breathe!"
She pulled away, pumped my chest several more times, and came down on me again. Falling tears slid along my cheek. Every time she leaned in, her chest pressed against me through her clothes.
No. Dangerous.
The front of my sweatpants tented, then shoved roughly up against the thighs of the woman sitting on my stomach.
"Kya?!"
Noona slowly dipped her head and looked down between her thighs. When she lifted it again, her eyes met mine. I'd had them cracked open.
"......"
"......"
Her face went scarlet in an instant, from her forehead all the way down her neck.
"...You."
"Thank you for saving me, Noona."
"Get up, you son of a bitch!!"
Through the wide-open window, the dawn wind slipped in and slowly pushed out the air that had pooled in the room.
It was about an hour after the fainting mess had passed.
"Drink. Barley tea's all I've got."
I held it out carefully, and she took it without a word. She sat with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up to her chest. The belly that had ballooned like a drum for two solid weeks had sunk flat, and her breathing came easier, but her head stayed jammed between her knees and showed no sign of rising.
"...Your chest. You okay."
After a long while, her voice leaked out through the gap.
"Yes. You did CPR with so much enthusiasm I think a rib or two cracked... but I'm fine."
"Shut up, seriously! I'll rip that mouth open!"
Noona jerked her head up and snapped it at me. The words were vicious, but the flush running from the tips of her ears down over her collarbones showed no sign of cooling. She knocked the barley tea back in gulps and thumped her own chest.
"I must actually be crazy. Live this long, and who'd have thought I'd stick my ass in the air and fart in front of a man. One nasty enough to knock a person out, at that."
She set the empty cup down, swept her messy hair back, and stared blankly out the window. For the first time I watched the shell called Yoon Seoyeon—always loud, always sure of herself—split open just a little.
"...It started in eighth grade."
"Sorry?"
"Finals day. My stomach had been twisting since morning, but raising my hand in the middle of an exam to say I needed the bathroom? That was never coming out of my mouth. I figured if I just held on a little longer, I'd be fine."
Her voice began to shake, bit by bit. More than ten years had passed, and still the air of that classroom seemed to be sitting somewhere inside her, exactly as it had been.
"Five minutes to the bell, the room dead quiet, and that's when my strength just gave out. Loud enough to rattle the whole classroom. Every kid turned and stared. The teacher froze and couldn't get a word out. And the smell—God, it was so bad the girl behind me opened the window and started dry-heaving."
Noona scrubbed hard at the corners of her eyes.
"From that day on, my nickname was Skunk. Walk the hall and kids would pinch their noses and get out of the way. Somebody left deodorant in my desk drawer. Even in high school I was at the hospital, choking down medicine by the fistful, and it wouldn't quit. I thought if I built my abs hard enough maybe I'd get some strength in my gut, so I lifted like I'd lost my mind. And that ended up becoming my job."
Noona laughed.
With her face wet with tears.
"But once you're a trainer, how are you supposed to not eat shakes and chicken breast? So my insides just kept rotting worse. In the end I never even managed a real relationship. Too scared I'd get found out."
At last one fat tear dropped onto her knee. The person sitting there wasn't the brash, foul-mouthed trainer from Gyeongsang. She was someone worn out from more than ten years of fighting her own body. Only then, for the first time, was I ashamed of myself—the guy with his ear to the wall, getting worked up on fantasies cribbed from dirty manga.
"It's not your fault, Noona."
With the joking and the sleaze both stripped away, my voice came out lower than I expected.
"It's an illness. How is that a curse? What's impressive is that you held it in all this time because you were watching other people's eyes."
"You passed out a minute ago and that's what comes out of your mouth? Don't lie. It was disgusting as hell."
"It wasn't disgusting."
I closed my hand tight around hers.
"I mean, it burned. Burned like absolute hell. Honestly, I made a round trip all the way to the gates of hell. But watching you let it all out in front of me, and seeing your face finally ease—that's so much better than listening to you groan alone on the other side of the wall."
"......!"
"So don't force yourself to hold it anymore. If your stomach hurts, knock on my door. You can come in here and let out as much as you want. And if I pass out, just give me mouth-to-mouth like before."
I let a beat hang.
"Your lips were soft, Noona."
Her eyes shook hard. In place of a world that flinched from her and called her dirty, that pinched its nose and stepped aside—someone who, for the first time, took the shameful underside she had kept bound tight for ten years and accepted it as if it were nothing. The problem was that this someone was an unemployed shut-in. A hopeless pervert who got turned on by the smell of another person's farts.
Noona bit down on her lip, pulled her hand free, and shoved my shoulder.
"Are you actually insane?! Who said I'd do it again? Smooth talker, my ass!"
She was pouring curses over me, and the corner of her mouth had lifted anyway. I was just getting ahead of myself—already half convinced this strange arrangement between neighbors was sliding toward something like romance—when her phone went off, loud and shrill.
The time was 2:15 in the morning. General Manager of the Fitness Center where Noona worked—a name that had slipped out of her mouth a few times. A man notorious inside the center for power-tripping and scandals.
"This bastard, at dawn..."
A trembling finger hit the call button. Over the speaker came a rough voice thick with drink.
A one-on-one VIP session. Never mind adjusting her diet—three straight hours that amounted to entertaining clients, where she would have to watch even the sound of her own breathing. From the other end of the line, that calculating voice went on.
Silence dropped over the room as if someone had thrown cold water across it. The breathing that had just eased began to roughen again. A morning in leggings stuck to the skin, demonstrating squats for three hours under the executives' eyes. For Noona, finished the moment her gut twisted even a little, that was no different from walking up the steps of a gallows.
"Tomorrow morning at nine. White leggings..."
"Noona?"
She had been staring into empty air. Slowly, she turned her head and looked at me.
"Kang Minchul."
"Yes?"
"You said earlier to come to your room and let it all out, didn't you? You said you'd take every bit of it, didn't you?"
"Uh... yes. I did, right?"
Noona shot to her feet, pulled something from her pocket, and set it on the table. A medicine envelope stamped with a hospital logo. Two pouches of bowel prep cleanser jutted out of the top.
"Got these ahead of a colonoscopy. Drink it and two, three hours later your guts turn inside out, yeah? Before nine in the morning I have to empty all of it. Not one speck of gas left."
She grabbed me by the collar and hauled me in until we were nose to nose. The tracks of her tears hadn't even dried, and she smiled. It was the kind of smile there was no way to refuse.