Buy Into the Fear
"What in the world is this..."
Department Manager Park Chae-eun had only just come in from the site, and the office that met her was pure wreckage.
Assistant Manager Ryu sat collapsed on the floor, the soul gone out of him. Clerk Lee was face-down on her desk, sobbing as if her heart would break. Section Chief Kim and Senior Baek belonged to another team, but they watched the pair and let out breaths of naked relief.
"Assistant Manager Kim, this is—"
Manager Park looked for Assistant Manager Kim the way she always did. He, too, had vanished.
'No... Even if the morning's work is finished, this is too much. There's still twenty minutes before lunch.'
She swept the office once more, found Assistant Manager Chae still in his seat, and came over.
"Assistant Manager Chae. What is going on here?"
"Ah... It looks like Assistant Manager Ryu's stock fell."
"...Stock?"
A twitch.
Manager Park's brow creased.
'I'm the department manager, and I was out there freezing, eating dust on site. And the assistant managers who stayed warm in the office were playing the market and now they're weeping and wailing...??'
She had never liked Assistant Manager Ryu's attitude to begin with. There was no chance this scene would look anything but ugly to her.
'In this whole office, the only one actually working during work hours is Assistant Manager Chae.'
She crossed the floor in an angry stride, seized the vacant Assistant Manager Ryu by the shoulder, and shook him hard.
"Assistant Manager Ryu, are you going to pull yourself together or not? You've got annual leave piled up to the ceiling, and you aren't even ashamed in front of the juniors? How much did you lose, to make a scene like this in the office? Did you blow your salary?!"
She shook him, and still he only stared through empty eyes into the air. He couldn't even answer. If anything, the words made the sniffling of Clerk Lee—sprawled on the desk beside him—swell louder.
"Waaaaah..."
"Hah... Assistant Manager Ryu."
Smothered by the futility of it, Manager Park pressed a hand to her brow and turned to the trading window glowing on the monitor.
'Come on. How much can you even lose in stocks...'
The office didn't know it, but she traded too, and so she could sympathize, at least a little, with the particular misery of losing money in the market. Even so—a grown adult, weeping buckets at his desk in the middle of the workday because a trade had gone against him. Was that even a sentence that made sense? This, she decided, was a matter of discipline, and she would have to settle it before she let it pass.
Then she saw the figure printed on the screen, and even she had to stop.
Return: −58.4%
Unrealized P&L: −215,840,000 KRW
'...My God.'
If it had been something like twenty million won, her by-the-book nature would certainly have had a word to say. A loss is a loss, but you still have to do your job—or she would have called him into a room and sat him down for a talk. But two hundred million. Even Manager Park felt the weight of a number like that.
'......'
A strange silence settled over the office. By the book or not, she was not enough of a psychopath to browbeat Assistant Manager Ryu here and now.
After a brief hush, the conclusion she reached was a hollow one. Then she caught sight of Assistant Manager Kim coming out of the restroom, the corner of his mouth twitching, and she spoke.
"...All of you, go eat a little early. Assistant Manager Chae, Assistant Manager Kim—come with me for a moment."
She told the others to pull themselves together, gave Assistant Manager Ryu's shoulder a couple of pats, and went out ahead of them. The two of us left him there alone and, before we quite knew how it had happened, followed her outside.
The place Manager Park took us, by pure coincidence, was the same Chinese restaurant where Assistant Manager Kim had first given me advice about stocks.
"Sit. All of you."
"Yes, Manager."
The air was heavy. She was the one who broke it.
"If you're having the crispy garlic chicken, order it."
"Pffft—!"
Silence. Manager Park stared at Assistant Manager Kim as if he'd lost his mind, and he coughed, scrambling for a napkin.
"Cough—! Cough—! Ahh, I'm sorry, Manager."
"...Is something the matter?"
"No, Manager."
When I answered, she was quiet for a moment, then spoke again.
"So. What happened to Assistant Manager Ryu?"
"Well..."
We told her over the meal.
"So Assistant Manager Ryu and Assistant Manager Chae took opposite sides of the trade..."
"Yes. That's about how it went."
She was more at home in the market than I would have expected. She followed our jargon without any trouble, turned it over for a long while, and then said what she wanted.
"All right. Then have Assistant Manager Kim go back to the office in a little while and bring him to me. I need to speak with Assistant Manager Ryu as well."
We finished eating and returned. Manager Park went up ahead of us.
"Hey, Assistant Manager Chae. One cigarette?"
"Sure."
A smoke break in the gap between things—we headed for the smoking area to air out our heads. In the grinding life of a construction firm, the after-meal cigarette was not optional. I didn't smoke, so I carried the Starbucks coffee Assistant Manager Kim had bought me on the way back and walked with him.
'Already my second coffee today.'
I was thinking it when Assistant Manager Kim stopped first. He glanced around, looked at me, and leaned in to whisper.
"Assistant Manager Chae, look at that... That's Assistant Manager Ryu, isn't it?"
"Mm... I think so."
Assistant Manager Ryu, in the smoking area? From what I'd heard, he used to smoke, but he'd quit completely after he got married. And yet there he stood alone, and around his feet lay at least five butts. Just then he took a long drag and shouted into his phone.
"No, honey—no, noona! I told you that's not it! Just listen to me, once!"
Assistant Manager Kim and I went quiet as if we'd agreed to it, and listened.
"I said it isn't! Until you sell, it isn't a loss yet! I haven't lost it!"
"Assistant Manager Chae, that..."
"...Let's hear him out first."
Assistant Manager Ryu pulled another drag and went on.
"Yeah, noona, your money's still right where it was, so don't worry... I'll make it back in no time, okay? More than that—the thing I mentioned... Yeah. Uh-huh. Right. Yeah. I'm telling you, that's how it is."
He shook out another cigarette and tried to light it. The lighter only clicked, refusing to catch, and he flung both lighter and cigarette at the ground in a fit of nerves.
"I said yes! So just pull the jeonse deposit on the place we're moving into—just for a little while—and send it to my account, will you???"
Beside me, Assistant Manager Kim sucked in a sharp breath.
"Assistant Manager Chae, we have to stop that, don't we??"
I didn't answer. He went on, worry plain on his face.
"That stock... You said it's going to fall further."
He was right. My ability was still telling me NIHEO had farther to fall, all the way to the floor. And into a stock like that he meant to shove a jeonse deposit—the lump-sum key money on the home where a newborn was supposed to live?
'If Assistant Manager Ryu ruins himself, that's his affair... What did his wife and the baby ever do?'
He was unpleasant now, but there had been a time when we were simply colleagues at the same company. I'd put money in a wedding envelope and traded smiles with him. And for an instant I saw the other face, too—the one that had lit up, radiant and happy, showing off pictures of the baby.
'A little kid's future, as well... If he pours every last won in there, that future only gets harder.'
I let out a short breath and walked toward him.
"Y-yeah, okay, send it quick. I'll be careful. Love you, noo— What?"
"Assistant Manager Ryu."
His face had slackened a little. The moment he saw me it twisted into something vicious, and he hung up.
"What? What, you come to laugh at the loser?"
"No, Assistant Manager Ryu, that's—"
"No, hell. Must feel real good, making all that money. Doesn't it? Assistant Manager Chae."
I said nothing. The air was turning ugly when Assistant Manager Kim rushed in.
"Hahaha! It's not that. Manager Park's looking for you, that's all. Seems she's got something she needs done. You'd better get up there."
He shot me an anxious, don't-do-this look. I sighed anyway, and as Assistant Manager Ryu made to push past me I said it.
"Assistant Manager Ryu. Don't do it."
"What??"
The words were barely out before he flared and spun on me.
"Assistant Manager Chae, what are you talking about?"
"...I'm telling you not to pull the housing deposit and dump it into the stock. You should get the money that's already in there out, and soon. It's going to fall further."
A crackle—and in an instant Assistant Manager Ryu's eyes were shot through with red.
"Assistant Manager Chae. Can you take responsibility for that?"
"Responsibility. You mean responsibility."
"Yeah. Responsibility. I've already lost far too much money. If I'm going to get it back, averaging down is the only way I've got!"
Looking at that bloodshot face, one thought came to me.
'When I was scalping every night and taking the money, did the people on the other side of those trades look just like this?'
Yes. Gamblers who shove everything they have into a skyrocketing name and do nothing but pray—and the face in front of me now—were probably the same thing.
He kept going.
"If I trust nothing but your word and the hundred and fifty million I've got left vanishes too, what then—are you going to guarantee it? Or have you actually got some dead-certain piece of information that says the price has to fall?"
I did have information. Clear information. It was my ability: a fierce intuition that the thing was going down. But I had no reason to lay that out for him honestly, in any detail. I shrugged.
"Well. Intuition. A feeling it's going to fall."
"Intuition...?? You're calling it intuition??"
His face went red in a flash.
"You son of a—! Assistant Manager Chae! You make a little money on a short and now you're mocking me? How can a person even do that!"
He said it as if he truly could not remember a single thing he himself had done.
'...He doesn't even remember sneering at us behind our backs with the rest of that tip-room?'
Assistant Manager Ryu hauled in one rough breath, then another. With a hand whose nails were split to the quick, he raked his hair back, forced a laugh, and said it.
"Assistant Manager Chae. You don't know the first damn thing about stocks. Don't go running your mouth with words you can't take responsibility for."
Responsibility. Responsibility, was it. Then what did that make Section Chief Kim, and Clerk Lee Ji-hye, who had lost their money on nothing but his say-so?
'I've done as much as I can.'
Investing was something each person had to answer for. Assistant Manager Ryu was no exception.
"Sure. I get it—you got lucky on a short and now you're drunk on yourself. But there's an old line in the market."
His eyes flashed.
The words had barely left him.
'...!!!'
"A beginner like you, who never touched a stock in his life, wouldn't know—but when everyone's frozen with fear, like right now, that's the time to buy! Buy into the fear, sell into the euphoria! You've never heard that?"
"Your seed was small anyway, so even if you caught the short you probably didn't make much. But you do know a short is the one position that has to fear fear the most, right? The moment the fear ends, a short dies in a heartbeat. You listening? If it's a good company, the winner is the one who buys when the price is falling and everyone's screaming that they're terrified!"
"Hmph!"
With that, Assistant Manager Ryu shoved past me.
But he was already gone from my head, wiped clean.
'This throbbing...'
The charge of a moonshot, stirred by his words, woke in that instant—the first time it had stirred since my younger sister's music.