I Bought a House
And so Hana and Bora spent an entire day on their feet, going from house to house. They weren't walking the whole sprawl of Seoul, of course. Whenever they moved from one place to the next, they took a car.
Hana succeeded in buying the home she wanted. The price was four billion won, and she closed the deal in cash, cool as anything. The agent stared at Bora and Hana with open astonishment. People who bought property by slapping down hard cash were rare. For most, taking out a loan was simply how it was done.
But Hana was wealthy beyond anyone else, and a sum like four billion won didn't make her so much as blink. It must have felt like dipping a single bucket out of a swimming pool. In that bright mood, they arrived at the building.
"This is my house, Bora?"
"Yeah. It's really the house you bought."
Hana held the certificate of sale and stared at it as if she might burn a hole straight through the paper, wonder written all over her face. Buying a house was new to her—or rather, it wasn't. She had lived her previous life as a man, so purchasing a home was not, strictly speaking, a first. Buying a luxury apartment worth four billion won, though, was. Until now she had scraped along on monthly rent and jeonse, the Korean system of enormous lump-sum deposits, and this was the first time she had ever bought a place outright. No wonder she was stunned.
And to hear it called her own house stirred a real attachment in her. The room in the building could be called hers too, but it was space that belonged to the Starlight Research Institute, and that made it harder to grow fond of. If the Institute ever asked her to clear out, she would have to clear out. Of course, the only person who would actually drive Hana out of that building would be a traitor to the whole order. If Hana disappeared, the Starlight Research Institute would collapse in the most literal sense, because ninety-nine percent of its revenue depended on her.
For now it was a company with money to burn, riding on Hana's back and scattering cash in every direction—but if she vanished, the outcome was so obvious you could already see it. During the month she had actually been gone, they had been forced to live through staggering regret, desolation, and obsession.
"Hmm..."
Hana turned the house papers this way and that, trying to tell whether they were real. Looking at them wouldn't let her tell, of course. She was still a child with a great deal left to learn about how the adult world worked, and real estate was a field even grown-ups often failed to understand. Society held far too many specialties for any one person to master.
Just as other people had no idea how Hana made her plants grow, there was plenty she herself didn't know about real estate and every other wide domain beyond her own. Bora didn't mind. Hana was a child who didn't have to know those things.
Given time, she would come to understand them naturally, and the Starlight Research Institute would help her with everything it had. Whenever there was something Hana didn't know, they stuck to her side like lawyers and taught her all of it.
Not many days later, I arrived at the apartment I had bought with my own money. From the entrance, security was drawn up tight. I took out the pass that proved I was a resident. The place was so strictly guarded that delivery drivers and anyone else who wanted inside had to go through a screening first.
Still, I was a resident, so I could get in through a simpler process than outsiders. Bora was with me. Looking out over the broad grounds of the complex, I felt my heart settle. I searched for the address written on the paper. The complex was so large that even with an address in hand, finding my own unit was difficult.
After walking for a while, I reached it. It wasn't ready to move into yet. The interior work had begun, but the inside was completely empty. The appliances and the rest of the furniture would have to be brought in ourselves. I left all of it to the Starlight Research Institute. I had said I could do it myself, but the thought alone gave me a headache.
There were simply too many things that needed choosing, one by one, for me to decide them all. So I told them, in rough outline, only what I needed, and asked them to take care of the rest. Otherwise the job looked as if it would never end. Right now they were stripping out the wallpaper and everything else and rebuilding the interior from scratch. It seemed I would need about a month of preparation before I could move in. Still, the work ought to be finished before vacation ended. Every time I came by, the view had changed.
Layla could not help staring in shock at the head of her superior, James. Only yesterday that scalp had been a barren plain, and today hair had come in so thick it looked like an extremely short athletic crop. The length was short enough that anyone who saw it might have assumed he was about to ship out for basic training.
But the length wasn't what mattered. What mattered was that hair had grown at all. Layla clapped a hand over her mouth, unable to show her astonishment any other way. She had just witnessed a miracle with her own eyes. James smiled, thoroughly pleased.
"This is a miracle. Starlight Foods is truly a company that works miracles."
James could feel his goodwill toward Starlight Foods shooting upward. They had cured his baldness—an affliction everyone called incurable—and it would have been strange if he hadn't grown fond of them. When he arrived in Korea he had been frowning, in no good mood at all, but today he felt as if he might lift off the ground and fly. He took a sip of the americano set before him and spoke.
"We've seen that it works, so we're taking Tangle to America. No question about it. You agree, don't you, Layla?"
Layla nodded. Westerners went bald at a far higher rate than East Asians. According to the research, Western men were ten to twenty percent more likely to lose their hair than East Asian men. And then came the real thunderbolt: Westerners often started going bald while they were still young.
Go abroad and you would find grown men, still young, who had shaved their heads down to the skin. East Asians were less likely to go bald than Westerners, but once they shaved, the shape of the skull tended to look unfortunate—there was simply no presence to it. You might say baldness didn't suit them.
The population of the United States was 330 million. Men, taken as exactly half, came to 160 million, and with the rate of hair loss around forty percent, roughly sixty million people living with baldness called America home. If Tangle restored hair for fifty percent of them, they could lock in thirty million customers eating it every single day. The market was enormous. And the moment you tasted Tangle, you had to keep eating it for the rest of your life.
Stop, and the hair fell out again, so—just like hair-loss medication—people with baldness had to eat one Tangle a day. That meant demand they could count on. At the very least, anyone whose hair had grown back after eating Tangle would never, ever quit. Of that, she was certain.
"I agree. I watched a miracle happen right in front of me."
Layla couldn't take her eyes off the hair now growing thick on James's head. She had looked at the bald version of him for so long that this one felt unfamiliar. Still, seeing him smile so wide, she had the sense that the days ahead were going to be rough. Negotiations demanded a cool head and rational thinking, and the James in front of her looked ready to hand over his liver and his gallbladder both.
The one mercy was that he couldn't speak Korean, so Layla could still keep a hand on the general course of the talks. Bringing the Tangle sold in Korea over to America mattered, but so did bringing it in at a reasonable price. The essential nature of a company was to generate profit.
"Hahaha. How did an ingredient this miraculous ever come out of Korea?"
James laughed as he looked at the Tangle set before his eyes. Just as he said, an ingredient capable of a miracle like this was anything but common. When word got out that a treatment for dementia had been found among materials from the gates, the whole world had stirred. Dementia was a disease with a reputation for being truly impossible to conquer. And unlike other illnesses, it erased memory, so the families who cared for the sick suffered alongside them.
But that was no longer necessary. Swallow a single simple pill, and the dementia was gone. There was no need to fear it anymore.
"Shall we head out, then?"
"Let's."
James and Layla left the hotel. Their destination was Starlight Foods. Now that they knew the company had food of a quality worth supplying to Walmart, all that remained was to negotiate a plan for getting it onto Walmart's shelves. Offer Starlight the chance to distribute across the American market, and they would leap in with both feet. The American market was enormous.