I Am a Train Operator

I am a train operator.

When people hear that, they usually ask one of two kinds of questions.

The first kind is strictly one-dimensional. Don't you get sleepy? How do you go to the bathroom? When do you eat? I generally take the trouble to answer those properly.

Sleep, first. For an operator, drowsiness is an accident waiting to happen, so I won't even swallow a single cold tablet without thinking. Human beings, though, are built to get sleepy, and the train has its own safeguard against that. Fail to work a pedal or a button at set intervals, and the train stops itself.

The bathroom is simpler than people expect. On duty I keep the water down, and if I can manage it, I just hold on. If they press me about the other kind, I make a run for it during turnaround standby, and the time they give me is about five minutes. When even that clearly won't be enough, I report to control, call a station attendant, and hold the train for a moment. Every train behind me then stacks up in a chain of delays. All things considered, it is easier to clench my sphincter and bear it.

Mealtimes change every day. Today I force the first bite down at four in the morning; tomorrow it is three in the afternoon. When my stomach starts to burn, I quickly swallow a few antacids rolling around in the cab drawer.

There are fewer environments a human being truly cannot endure than people think.

There is one thing, though, that people almost never ask. Then where are you when you rest?

The reason is simple. They aren't curious. They assume, of course, that I rest in the standby room.

The standby room is always packed. There is a television, a baseball broadcast somebody left on, and people who will not stop talking at the man who only hears out of one side of his head. So I rest somewhere else.

Just between us, then. An operator carries a ring of keys that can open every door in the Seoul subway. The cab, the switchgear rooms, the communications rooms, the ventilation rooms, the track-access doors, and any number of secret doors besides. There are more doors under Seoul than you would think.

One of those secret doors is on the third basement level of Sinseol-dong Station. That room is my standby room.

The reason? There isn't one.

I once asked a station attendant there, offhand, whether there was a place like that underground, and he turned the question right back on me. I liked that reaction, so I decided the room was mine.

At first I only ate there. Now it is packed tight with instant ramen, canned food, coffee, bottled water, blankets, a spare uniform, a medical kit, and every kind of junk. Ten years of filling it, a little at a time, and somewhere along the way it became enough that I could shut myself in alone for more than a year and be perfectly fine.

If you ask why I stockpiled that much, there is no real reason for this either.

It is only that if you stay long enough in a place with no people, the wish to simply remain there lifts its head without warning. Every time it did, I carried something else back.

So this was not preparation. It was only a secret hobby of my own, a private longing for a day when I would not have to go back out into the world.

Anyway, I swallow stories like that. Once I have more or less satisfied the answers they actually want—the primitive curiosities about bodily functions—people nod vaguely and say:

"Ah. That must be rough."

Then they pause. I take the pause as the signal that the real question is coming.

Without fail, they lower their voices, eyes bright, as if digging for something secret, and ask with care.

"Do a lot of people kill themselves? Have you... seen someone die?"

Then I answer exactly as it is, hiding nothing, so the trouble they have taken to pry into misfortune will not go to waste. I answer more carefully than I did the first question.

Op by op. Operator by operator. Our version of case by case.

Some people drive for twenty years and never see it once. If your luck is bad, you may see it several times in a few years. These days, thanks to the platform screen doors, most operators reach retirement without a single incident.

So it is not skill, and it is not effort. It belongs entirely to luck.

And I was not on the lucky side.

"I've seen it twice. The first one died."

The second took the hearing in my left ear forever.

By this point, people have no interest left in saving face.

"Your hearing? So you can't hear on the left now?"

And they press. What on earth happened. As if I owe them the answer.

So I faithfully repay the creditor in front of me a debt I never borrowed.

Nine years ago. I was in my first year as an operator.

Now every line is sealed to the ceiling with full-height enclosed screen doors. Back then, the aboveground stations on Line 2 had only railing-type doors that rose to chest height.

Even a one-ton car does not stop dead the instant you hit the brakes. A four-hundred-ton lump of steel rolling at sixty kilometers an hour will shove on for dozens of meters on inertia after you throw the emergency brake.

It happened as I was entering the platform.

A woman climbed over the safety door and jumped down onto the tracks. A clean motion, without a shred of hesitation.

From the instant I saw the crown of her head to the moment I seized the master controller and shoved it all the way in, not even a second passed. Even so, the train ran well past her before it finally stopped.

There was no tremendous sound. Just a soft tap. That was all.

The shape, of course, becomes impossible to recognize. It was unmistakably a person. It ends up looking like something that is no longer a person.

Cleanup took more than two hours. They cut the power, the on-scene examination followed, and the recovery crew went down onto the tracks.

I sat blank on a platform bench for the whole of those two hours.

A black plastic bag on the tracks caught my eye. What is that—I stared, spellbound, without meaning to. A moment later I understood it was not a plastic bag. It was a clump of a woman's hair, tied with a hair tie.

Someone draped a blanket over my shoulders. I remember my teeth chattering, though it was the middle of summer.

They gave me what they call consolation leave, five shifts off, and assigned a counselor. There was no criminal liability, of course. I had driven by the rules, and she was the one who had jumped.

On the sixth day I came back to work and took the controls again.

The second time was three years ago.

One bay of the screen doors had failed, and yellow safety tape was strung across it in a messy web. I slowed as I entered the station. I was braking, measuring the distance between the stop-position marker on the end wall of the platform and the nose of the train.

I saw a man. A suit, eyes lowered—an ordinary passenger waiting. I turned my gaze back to the stop line without much thought. In that instant he tore the tape away and stepped one foot out into empty air.

Even as my hand moved ahead of my brain and threw the emergency brake, I thought, Ah. Too late.

I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for that tap. What came from under the train was a human groan.

I don't like the word miracle, but that day it really was one.

The angle at which he tumbled onto the tracks lined up so strangely that his body slipped neatly into the few dozen centimeters of empty space between the wheels. His arm was bent the wrong way and blood ran from his leg, but he was still, unmistakably, the shape of a person, alive, with his eyes open.

The rescue team arrived and hauled him up. Even then I could hear the scuffle—paramedics trying to lay him on a stretcher, the man insisting he would walk out on his own feet.

I watched with both hands shoved into my pants pockets.

My head filled with calculations. How many trains behind me had stacked up. How many passengers would miss the last train. And for how many days, or months, I would have to live carrying the afterimage of this fucking moment.

I looked at the man's face while I thought it, the way you look at an insect. That was, in fact, exactly how it felt.

"If you're going to die, die quietly by yourself."

I don't actually remember whether those words jumped out of my mouth, whether only my lips moved, or whether I chewed them down inside. The only thing I am sure of is that the man was staring straight at my face.

He came at me like a zombie, one broken arm flapping. There was no time to step back, and no time to pull my hands out of my pockets. The bastard bit straight into my right ear.

At the hot pain I snapped my head the other way on reflex. On my left was the sharp corner of a fire-hose cabinet.

At the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠exact speed I had jerked my own head, my left temple drove into that pointed corner.

The world seemed to burst. Sound drained out of the left side the way water runs out of a tub.

Later the doctor told me the right ear would close up quickly with a few stitches. There would be a scar, but hearing would be fine.

The real problem was the left. Whipping my own head into the corner had completely wrecked something in the delicate structure inside the temporal bone, the part that hears.

So it is a funny story, when you think about it.

People assume I went deaf because my ear was bitten. The right one, the one he bit, hears perfectly well. The ear that will never hear again is the left, and the thing that ruined it was not that bastard. It was me.

When I reach this part, a short silence usually falls. In the end they cannot help asking.

"So... what happened to him?"

Then I smile and say I don't know. I really don't. I took care of the workers' compensation paperwork and threw the rest at the corporation's legal team.

That day, in front of my eyes, he was carried off somewhere with a broken arm, and I never saw him again.

Losing one ear is not simply having the volume cut in half. You lose the direction of sound.

Someone calls your name and you cannot tell whether they are in front of you or behind, so you have to look all around. I started filling that blank with my eyes.

The moment I enter a platform, I scan where people are standing. Who is pressed right up against the screen door. Who has that strange look, already set in a posture to throw their body at any moment.

It became a habit. A habit of watching anything, relentlessly.

That disgusting habit taught me something. When ordinary life leaves its track, an unpleasant omen always lifts its head first.

Today was exactly like that.

"Ha. I'm going to boil to death."

It was a day shift. The kind of diagram everyone is glad to draw—no need to drag my body awake at four in the morning and drive the first train half asleep.

Home to the crew office at Gunja Depot is about a ten-minute walk. Today I had to take refuge in a convenience store halfway there, drain half a bottle of water, and last five minutes under the air conditioner before I could barely finish the walk.

When I stepped back out into the blazing sun, I noticed the street was strangely quiet. It was not because one ear was dead.

People were wilted all along it. On the chairs at the bus stop, on the sidewalk pavers, on the steps in front of buildings. Every one of them sat slumped, skin flushed red, panting.

The ones still walking were no better. Soaked through with sweat, eyes unfocused, dragging their feet.

No wonder. The weather had truly gone insane.

In a heat wave like this, common sense says you do not go to work. This is a temperature at which the state ought to shut the country down. But this is the Republic of Korea. Even if people are roasting on the pavement, punching through this open-air sweat lodge to get to the office is a national trait.

I was one of them. A public corporation I had fought my way into. Until City Hall ordered a full suspension of subway service, I had to crawl through this heat if that was what it took, clock in, and take the controls.

I finished what was left of the water and walked straight past the people sitting collapsed on the ground.

When I finally reached the office, the inside was much the same. This is a place that has to cool instruments and servers, so they run the air conditioning cold enough to freeze you all year round.

"Seo-uk, you here?"

I could not find the direction of the voice. I stood where I was and turned my head first. Only after I had swept the whole office did I spot the chief, body folded in behind a monitor.

"Chief. Air conditioner's not running?"

"Been like this all night. Warning light keeps tripping—says the cooling load's too high. I think it was around three yesterday morning. Heard the Euljiro tunnel set a record."

"Thirty-five?"

For the past ten years, tunnel temperature had stayed around twenty-five no matter how hot it got. Even in record heat waves, it had never gone above that.

"Are we running normal service in this weather?"

"Goddamn it, they said run ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it! Rail at fifty-five, caution. Sixty, slow order. Sixty-four, shut the aboveground sections. Follow the rule, they say."

"And if there's an accident?"

"Ah, then we'll stop! Heat-illness calls have been pouring in since morning. Control's completely out of its mind."

"..."

The chief wiped the sweat from his forehead with a shirt sleeve that was already soaked through and pointed at the radio log.

"Nobody's got their head on straight. Watch yourself on the way out. Hah. Today is scary hot."

I finished roll call and the breathalyzer, slung the radio over my shoulder, and rode a deadhead train out of the yard on the Seongsu Branch toward Seongsu Station.

The moment I stepped onto the Seongsu platform, thick, stifling air pressed down on my chest.

"Hoo. If it's like this from ten in the morning, what are they planning to do this afternoon."

I pushed through the steaming air to the relief train waiting at the platform. The operator I was relieving opened the cab door and climbed down, his face wet with sweat.

"Mr. Seo-uk. Watch the aboveground section. When I passed Konkuk earlier, the rail was over fifty-five."

He left the short warning and drifted away into the crowd, unsteady on his feet. I climbed into the cab and locked the door tight before anything else.

Clunk.

The door shut, and the noise and heat outside cut off as if they had been a lie. A cramped cab, a little over two meters each way. The space I had been shut inside for ten years felt uniquely suffocating today.

I sat down and pulled the microphone over.

"Control, Train 2001. Relief complete. Departing on time."

I pulled the master controller and left the Seongsu platform. Acceleration was half a beat sluggish compared to usual. For ten in the morning, that meant there were more people aboard than there should have been.

As we climbed onto the elevated track, harsh sunlight poured in through the front glass. Radiant heat punched through the thick insulated window and into the cab. The air conditioner was already on full cold, but my shirt stuck to my back in wet patches.

I checked the TCMS monitor to the right of the console, the train control and monitoring system.

Then the radio came.

"Sixty-one?"

Ahead, it was no longer a matter of heat shimmer rising off the rails. The whole scene was warped enough to look distorted.

I immediately pushed the master controller and killed speed.

"Ah. Every one of these is an aboveground station. This is bad."

The next stop was Konkuk University. I started braking as I entered, and as always I scanned the positions and postures of the people lined up on the platform.

My eyes locked on a man standing at the very front of the safety line. He was pressed so close his nose nearly touched the screen-door glass. He had jammed his fingers into the gap in the rubber seal where the doors met, and his whole weight was pitched toward the tracks.

That bastard. He's prying the door—

He was going to jump.

The past rose up. Was this about to be the third stroke of filthy luck?

I kept hold of the master controller and shot my other hand toward the emergency-brake button.

In the instant before I pressed it, the man's face came into view.

"That's..."

I snatched the reaching hand back and pushed the master controller into ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠brake. I stopped the train just barely on the mark.

Thud.

His forehead hit the screen-door glass as it was. His body slid straight down the sealed door and onto the floor. He collapsed without a scream and began to tremble, convulsing.

Not a single drop of sweat stood on the flushed nape of his neck, or on his forehead.

A middle-aged woman beside him caught his arm to prop him up, then flinched as if she had touched a kettle at a rolling boil and shook her hand off.

At the same time, here and there, people began to fold. One, then another.

A station attendant in a high-visibility vest, running down the stairs on the far side, clutched the railing and staggered.

I watched the bizarre scene unfolding in front of me and froze completely, my forehead pressed to the cab window.

Then a sharp voice came from the radio slung over my right shoulder.

I turned to the TCMS monitor on reflex.

It had been forty-two degrees when I left Seongsu.

A single stop. Three minutes, no more.

"They want me to open the doors here?"

Right now this train was carrying more than nine hundred passengers.

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