It's Not Drugs, It's Ramen
"Everyone, get ready to wash. No telling when we'll next get to bathe like human beings."
The words were barely out before Han Dongsu swept a look around the shower room. Disbelief plain on his face, he ran a hand over the wall tile and asked.
"Now hold on. What kind of place is this, done up so grand? A bathhouse, down under a subway station."
"It's the night-duty room for track maintenance workers. Track crews. Subway track work is done late at night, after every train has stopped running. Usually between one and four in the morning. And the job means getting covered head to toe in metal dust and grease."
I set my backpack down, worked my feet out of shoes crusted with every kind of filth, and went on explaining to the others.
"Once a shift ends, the crews need somewhere to wash and shut their eyes. The room was cleared before dawn, and nobody's come in to work since. That's why it's clean."
"But the water comes out?"
"It's the water that was sitting in the tank. It falls by gravity alone from the rooftop tank, so even with the power out and the motor pumps dead, you still get water."
At that, Han Dongsu—plastered in sweat, blood, and dust of every kind—seemed to register all at once how filthy he was. He started yanking his clothes off as he talked.
"Well, I'll be! Ain't that something. Water from a rooftop tank would've been boiling up there on the roof. Cooled a fair bit on the way down, I reckon? Better that way. Way I feel now, lukewarm water won't wreck a body the way ice water would. Ain't that so?"
The shower room was split by a steel partition into two separate stalls. I divided us up and named an order.
"Ms. Kim, Mr. Park. You two go in first."
Kim Jeyeon didn't waste a word. She took a towel and stepped into the first stall. Park Jihoon kept his mouth clamped shut, set the shotgun down, and moved to the second.
A moment later the water valves turned.
Kwaaaaa—!
"Haaa...!"
A sound I couldn't sort as moan or scream burst from beyond the partition. They had crawled through the sixty-degree-Celsius hell aboveground and come back drenched in filth. Just hearing it, I felt cooler myself.
It wasn't long before Kim Jeyeon stepped out, roughly toweling her wet hair, her color a shade closer to human. Some warmth seemed to have come back into Park Jihoon's face as well, pale and beaten down as it had been.
"Next. Mr. Han and I."
The two of us each took a stall.
Shaaaaa—!
"Waaaaah! Ugh—! Whoo! Feels like I might live now!"
From the next stall Han Dongsu roared. He even started humming, and the sound of him savoring the moment more than any of us carried, booming, clear out past the booth.
Lukewarm water washed the clotted blood and the dust tangled through my hair. I scrubbed with the big bottle of body wash stocked in the stall until my skin went red. On an ordinary day I wouldn't have touched it—cheap detergent, the artificial scent vicious—but now it felt like salvation, something that might scour the unclean, ominous smell of death off my whole body.
I finished the coolest, most refreshing shower of my life, then dug through the duty-room cabinets and put on a spare track-crew uniform that had been stored there.
"Whew. These clothes are built tough."
Han Dongsu cinched the belt of navy cargo pants that fit him just right and let out a rough laugh.
The night crews' work clothes weren't cut from ordinary cloth. Thick bands of fluorescent silver reflective tape ran across the chest, the back, and the calves, so a man could be picked out even in the dark. The shirt was short-sleeved and a fluorescent orange so sharp it hurt to look at, woven tough enough not to tear when it dragged on rail or ballast. Deep tool pockets hung all over the pants, ready for whatever you needed to shove into them.
"Our officer boy—warm tone or cool tone? Tiny little face, handsome as they come, and that orange sets him off just right. Looks like some actor."
Under Han Dongsu's shameless ribbing, the muscles of Park Jihoon's face finally eased, and he smiled, awkward. The four of us, dressed in identical fluorescent work clothes and smelling of the same soap, traded a few idle jokes.
"Engineer. Hold out your hands."
I stuffed the clothes soaked through with blood and sweat into the trash without a second's regret. I was sitting on the floor, opening my backpack to sort it, when Kim Jeyeon came over. Disinfectant, gauze, and wound-closure tape were in her hands.
I looked down at my palms without thinking. From the morning train on, torn cuts had left both of them a wreck. I hadn't even known they hurt until now. Whether the shower had softened the wounds and they'd split open late, or whether it was only that I was seeing them with my own eyes, they suddenly burned like mad.
"If tetanus sets in, we're in serious trouble."
Pssh— pssh—
Kim Jeyeon sprayed hydrogen peroxide over the open cuts. White foam boiled up, and a pain like something boring into the bone surged through. An emergency-room nurse to the bone, she was very fast and entirely without mercy. She picked the leftover grit out with tweezers, spread antibiotic ointment on thick, and wrapped palm and wrist carefully in a pressure bandage.
"Don't grip hard with that hand for a few days."
"...If I can."
Meanwhile Han Dongsu was tearing through the pantry cupboard in the corner of the duty room.
"Well, look at this! These folks hid every last tasty thing away in here, didn't they? Hhk— what is this!"
He hauled a portable butane burner and a dented aluminum pot out of the kitchen cabinet. Then his face lit as if something had just come to him. He lunged for his bag, came up with packets of ramen, and held them out.
"Whoa..."
It was the first dazed sound of wonder to leave my mouth. Han Dongsu shook a packet in front of me.
"Jealous, ain't you? You want it, don't you? You said clear as day you weren't eating any. Regretting it now, ain't you?"
"...A little jealous, yes."
He watched me lick my lips, chuckled, and pulled two more packets from the bag.
"Aw, come on now. I ain't that stingy a man."
"Whoa. Mister."
Even Park Jihoon, who had been hanging back to read the room, let the gasp out as if his soul had left him.
Delighted, Han Dongsu seated the butane canister on the burner and got a flame going.
Hiss— pop—!
The cabinet held more than a burner and a pot. Dozens of packs of precooked instant rice, Spam, cans of tuna, loose ramen-seasoning packets scattered around, even sticks of instant coffee mix, heaped up in piles.
Han Dongsu poured water into the pot, then chunked two cans of Spam in with a spoon. He trickled in the oil from a tuna can, dropped three packets of noodles after it, and stirred the seasoning through until it dissolved. But there were four of us, and we had gone hungry all day. Three packets of ramen was a portion Han Dongsu could have finished alone without trouble, and there was no chance a microwave was going to run.
"There won't be enough."
As if my worry were funny, he said it proud of himself.
"Just you watch. I'll fix enough to split your belly wide open."
The moment the broth boiled, he upended four whole packs of the hard precooked rice into the pot and started ladling broth over them the way you soften rice for soup. Again and again the big ladle poured it down. The stiff grains drank the water and swelled plump in no time. In case it came out bland, he shook in one more loose packet of ramen seasoning from the cabinet.
When the savory, salty smell filled the room, the four of us were nearly out of our minds.
"Everybody grab a bowl and get over here. I'll swear on it. This broth is drugs. Straight-up drugs."
No one waited to see who would go first. We took up spoons and pushed the ramen and rice into our mouths.
"Hoo. Hoo... hah... hup."
"Oh my. This is actually delicious. The ramen I eat on hospital night shifts doesn't even compare."
"Mr. Han. This broth is no joke."
"I-it's... so good I could cry..."
We filled ourselves in a mindless rush for a long while, and even then Han Dongsu wasn't finished. He shook two sticks of coffee mix into each paper cup from the pantry and poured in a careful measure of water boiled in the pot. A sweet, sharp creamer-coffee scent spread all through the duty room.
Were we allowed to live this extravagantly? Every swallow felt like every cell in my body was tingling, stretching awake.
When the meal ended, fullness and a heavy drowsiness rolled over us like a wave.
"So. We're sleeping here tonight, yeah?"
Han Dongsu turned a pleading look on me.
"Yes. We sleep in this duty room tonight. We move at dawn tomorrow."
"Whoo. Now you're listening to me."
So we each claimed a bed and lay down.
Click.
I switched off the lamp on the nightstand, and in an instant the duty room sank into perfect dark. I couldn't tell whether it was imagination or real, but from somewhere far off a howl, like something wailing, drifted in faint and humming.
I hated a darkness this complete. It got under my skin. With only one ear I couldn't locate a sound at all. Where there was light, whether a noise reached the right ear or the left, I could find its source with my eyes. In dark like this, that was impossible. I could hear someone's footsteps and have no way of knowing whether they were coming at my face or coming up behind my back.
Which meant that in a space without a single point of light, I was completely defenseless.
So I never took my hand off the knife handle in my right pocket. I set my back tight to the wall and closed my eyes.
I don't know how much time passed. The others' breathing had settled into a steady rhythm, and I was just drifting toward a distant sleep—
Clink.
A very faint metallic sound. I couldn't tell the direction in the dark, but I knew exactly what it was. The bundle of master keys that opened every door in the subway, the one I had put carefully away in my backpack in front of the cabinet.
At that sound I tightened my grip on the pocket knife and was just about to push myself up.
Crash—thud!
"Aaagh! Son of a bitch!"
With a dull impact Han Dongsu went tumbling across the floor, screaming. I heard Kim Jeyeon and Park Jihoon suck in startled breaths and jolt awake.
"What happened."
"Ah—aigoo. Damn it. It's me, it's me. Ugh..."
Han Dongsu groaned from the floor.
"Had to piss so bad I was heading for the toilet and walked smack into this bastard of a table. Aigoo, my knee. Sorry, all of you. Hurry on back to sleep."
He'd been going to the bathroom? I was certain I had heard my key ring clink.
But I didn't switch on a flashlight and shove it in his face, and I didn't start questioning him.
"...Be careful."
Still gripping the knife tight inside my pocket, I gave him only that. Han Dongsu seemed embarrassed himself. I heard him groaning as he crawled back to his place.
And then, without knowing when I had gone under, I blacked out into sleep.
Flash.
I opened my eyes. It was dawn, the hour of the day when the temperature falls lowest. I was the first one awake. Quietly I sat up and flipped the switch on the nightstand lamp.
Pop.
A soft light filled the duty room. I turned my head toward the bed opposite.
Krrrrngh... phweeee...
Han Dongsu lay with his belly bare, snoring, dead to the world.
I got up without a sound and stood looking quietly down at his sleeping face.
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