Want to Eat Malatang?
"Ugh..."
Jiyu stirred awake, with no idea when she had drifted off. She was certain she had only been listening to Hana's song, and then sleep had come creeping in... She looked around and found everyone else facedown on their desks, dead asleep, and she could only stare at the unreal sight of it.
Fortunately, Hana was still on her feet. Jiyu rose feeling impossibly refreshed. She always woke tired, and it had been a long time since she had slept this deeply.
"Hana, what happened?"
"Well..."
Hana scratched her head as she explained. Listen to a song she was singing, and sleep would come for you. Singing along was fine, but if she performed a solo like this, everyone simply dropped off. Jiyu couldn't help being astonished by an ability like that.
Hunters existed these days, of course, and plenty of people could strike fire out of empty air or summon water and work other unreal wonders, so powers no longer struck anyone as strange. Even so, an ability that put you to sleep the moment she sang—Jiyu had never heard of anything like it.
As they talked, the others began to wake. Thankfully, it seemed they had only slept a little while. If they had gone under as deeply as they did at home, the day's classes would have been finished.
The children woke first, and only when the teacher rose last did the adorable little incident of Hana's lullaby finally come to an end, with everyone quietly resolved that next time they would not let Hana sing alone.
"Hana, let's go get malatang!"
"Huh?"
Because everyone had fallen asleep during music class, I hadn't even managed lunch. I'd been stuck awkwardly holding down the classroom by myself. Maybe that was why, as dismissal drew near, I was hungry enough for my stomach to glue itself to my back. Jiyu and Yumi seemed to feel the same, both of them clutching their bellies.
"Right. If you want it, you ought to eat it!"
Then again, I had no idea what malatang was even supposed to taste like. The sweet-and-spicy things girls went wild for—tteokbokki, malatang, and the rest—were foods I rarely touched. Back when I was a man, the most I ever ate was spicy pork stir-fry or a pork cutlet. Malatang, or rice cakes buried under a heap of cheese, I had hardly tried. I'd had tteokbokki from the school lunch line now and then, but malatang would be a first.
I was curious what could make them love it this much, so I decided to give it a try.
"Hana, have you ever had malatang?"
Jiyu asked, linking her arm through mine. Class was over, and we were walking toward the shop. I answered her honestly.
"Nope. I've never had it, not once!"
"Really? Then trying it this once wouldn't be so bad!"
Beside us, Yumi was nodding along.
"You and Yumi have had it a lot, huh?"
The two of them were carrying themselves like seasoned experts. At my question, they answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"I don't think there's a girl in our class who dislikes malatang."
"Yeah! There isn't a girl alive who doesn't like tteokbokki and malatang!"
They said it so firmly that I didn't bother picking a fight. Hearing Jiyu and Yumi go that far, malatang was starting to sound delicious.
The weather was miserably hot, though, and what I really craved was something cold. On a day like this, one bowl of shaved ice and I felt as if I might float right off the ground...
But one look at the two of them told me that eating malatang was already a settled fact. I trailed after Jiyu and Yumi like a prisoner being marched off to jail. Since it had come to this, trying the stuff didn't seem like such a bad experience. And once we were inside, the air-conditioning would be running, and it would be cool.
The heat was an outdoor problem. The shop would have the cooling on. I walked along behind them, and before I knew it we had arrived. The place didn't look especially famous. Shops were springing up like mushrooms these days, so that was probably why. It was hard to find a place that had settled into one alley and done a long, patient business there.
Whether the rent was too high or the food simply didn't sell, shops that held the same spot for years were rare. Only the franchises survived to any real degree. Everything else failed to last three years before it closed.
And so I took Jiyu's hand and Yumi's, and stepped into the malatang shop.
"So I finally get to buy some."
The line had been too long the day before, and he hadn't been able to purchase any. Only after taking a half-day off and standing in line for nearly an hour did he manage it. If he hadn't used that half-day, he wouldn't have gotten any today either. He had never dreamed, not even in his sleep, that Wall Street was home to this many bald men. Everyone pretended otherwise, hiding their baldness under wigs. Otherwise there was no way that many bald heads could have appeared all at once.
"The packaging's pretty decent, isn't it?"
"It's plastic, not glass, so even if you drop it you won't have to worry about it shattering."
"Still, three hundred dollars for this tiny bottle... For a month's supply of hair-loss medicine, that's actually a fair price, isn't it?"
Unlike Korea, ingredients in America were cheap, but anything that required human labor—dining out, and other services—came at a steep price, easily double what eating out cost back home. To these men, three hundred dollars was money they would pay without a second thought, on the assumption that it would cure their hair loss.
"Rest up over the weekend. We'll meet again with full heads of hair."
"Yeah. A fifty percent chance is an absolute steal."
"I just hope I'm the one whose hair grows."
The three Wall Street managers parted laughing, grateful that even a small hope had appeared. Ordinarily they would have had to live in resignation to their baldness, but now a hope too big to ignore was waiting for them.
The weekend shot past, and when the three managers gathered again, every one of them appeared with a lush, abundant head of hair.
"This is insane!"
"Did Willmart actually sign a contract with the devil?"
"I never imagined I'd wash my hair with shampoo again! I thought I'd have nothing to do with shampoo until the day I died!"
They made up their minds to hold their Willmart stock for the rest of their lives. To the bald, Willmart was an apostle of God—a god, that is, who had made their hair anew.
Once Tangle hit the shelves and the daily sales were made public, the numbers climbed with no end in sight, as if every bald person in the country had assembled at once.
"Ten million dollars in a single day? That's what three hundred Willmart branches brought in?"
"So you're saying a month would be three hundred million? Talk sense!"
"There were this many people losing their hair in America?"
The revenue from three hundred branches left plenty of stock investors with their mouths hanging open. The figures were hard to believe, and the fruit hadn't even been rolled out to every store yet. For a single item, the volume was enough to wonder whether this might be the best-selling fruit in America.
Of course, the fact that it was the first day had to be taken into account. One purchase of Tangle was enough to last roughly a month, and as proof, sales the next day fell by about half. Even so, the volume had been proven staggering. Distributed across every region of the United States, it could probably bring in two or three times the current sales.
There were people whose hair refused to grow even after they ate Tangle. It was a fifty-fifty chance, after all, and so the page was sometimes plastered with furious reviews from those whose hair had not come back.
But rave reviews from the people whose hair did grow buried them, until an unpleasant one became hard to find. To those cured of their hair loss, at least, Willmart was a company touched by God.
Even into the following week, people who wanted Tangle overflowed. It got to the point that folks living out in the sticks—where a Willmart stood, but Tangle had not yet arrived—were driving into the big cities for it. One purchase would last them a month anyway.
Only after a full week did the hoarding frenzy settle to some degree. If every bald person had been cured, the stock would have run short, but because only half of them were saved, there was never a moment when supply failed and the shelves went bare.
"We've got to buy the stock!"
"This is going up, no question!"
People who had lived the miracle began buying Willmart shares like mad. The stock climbed with a momentum that seemed to have no ceiling, and there was no sign of it coming down.
Amazon, which had been closing hard on Willmart's heels, could only watch that explosive growth and suck its thumb. Tangle, after all, was supplied to Willmart alone.