The Move Is Complete
"Nngh!"
I looked at the boxes stacked in the corner of the room. I couldn't even tell when I'd managed to gather that much luggage. The one mercy was that I didn't have to move the furniture and the rest of it myself. The staff would haul all of that, they said. I gazed at the boxes, wistful.
I couldn't begin to count how much trouble I'd gone through collecting them. If I told Jiyu and Yumi about all that effort, they'd laugh and call it childish, but I meant every word. At least through this year, I intended to keep collecting, steady as ever. Of course, I had no idea how that might change once I got older.
"Hana! Time to go eat."
"Okay!"
I abandoned the boxes and headed outside.
I couldn't have told you how the month had gone. I might not have noticed, but I could tell the staff had been moving at a frantic pace. Whenever I dropped by the office late in the evening to play, they were still there. Nobody ever bothered to explain to me why the overtime stretched all the way to eight.
Our office people used to clock out sharp at six, but for nearly a month I hadn't seen a single one leave on time. I didn't mind, of course. It meant I'd gained people to play with. Even if someone stayed behind on night duty, one person and a whole crowd were not the same thing. Today, though, was the last of it. Every employee in our office was moving now—me included.
"We're really moving?"
"Yeah, Hana. I thought a whole month of overtime was going to kill me..."
Bora, Haru, and Maru were sprawled all over the office. To be fair, those three had done the most work of anyone. That was because every evening I'd gone over and begged them to play with me. Between the actual work and looking after me, they must have had a rough time. I'd caught on partway through and cut way back on dropping by to play.
Then the next day came. I got up a little late. When I walked into the office in my dinosaur pajamas, the place was as hollow and bare as an office whose swindlers had fled in the night. Maru had stayed behind, finishing up some last bit of tidying.
"Maru. Where'd everybody go?"
"Oh, you're up, Hana? They all went to the new office! We've still got the last of the luggage to sort."
"Yeah...? So this office is the last of it?"
"Mm-hmm. You'll be heading out soon too, so let's get you changed, okay?"
"Waaah!"
Maru caught me and changed my clothes before I could escape. Everything in my room had already been moved, little by little, over the past month. All that was left now was a single bed, and even that was an old one we'd replaced. The new bed had already moved into the building in Seoul ahead of me.
I'd been to the new building in Seoul once myself, and it wasn't all that different from here. They'd used an entire floor in exactly the same way: my room, with the office attached right beside it. They'd probably laid it out like that so I could settle in quickly.
"Hana. We need to stay outside and go in a little later. They say they're still sorting the luggage."
"Can't we go in first...?"
"You might get hurt while they're hauling the boxes. The department head said to come once everything's put away."
"Aha."
Maru and I killed time outside. All it amounted to was eating, then camping out in a café while meaningless hours slipped past. I wanted to see my room already. I'd stopped by often enough over the month that it wasn't surprising or new anymore. Still, the facilities were better than at the old building. And more than anything, I loved how close it was to the elementary school I went to.
A commute that used to take an hour each way wouldn't even take ten minutes now. This was a revolution. The two-hour round trip had been wearing on me little by little, and now I wouldn't have to suffer through it anymore. I could stay out late playing with Jiyu and Yumi, too.
It was close enough that, if it really came to it, I could send Maru home and make my own way back to the building. A taxi would get me there in under ten minutes—that was where the building stood now. I smiled, thoroughly pleased with a location like that.
We whiled away the time outside until, before I knew it, the afternoon had grown late. Maru and I set off to move into the new building.
Kim Jeongchil was a lung cancer patient. He smoked so much that even other people clicked their tongues at the sight of him, a chain-smoker through and through. It had gotten to the point where some suspected that smoking itself might be his hobby.
And he'd taken the full blowback of that habit. At the comparatively young age of forty, he'd come down with lung cancer. Fortunately they'd caught it early, at stage one. Even though lung cancer was a disease with a poor survival rate, finding it at stage one brought the odds of survival up to ninety percent.
Unless it was something truly the worst, like pancreatic cancer, early detection meant a fairly high chance of pulling through. Now admitted to begin cancer treatment, Kim Jeongchil found his hands itching. He wasn't a gambling addict, of course. He didn't know the first thing about gambling. The itch was the aftermath of quitting cigarettes.
A dog might swear off dung, but the odds of a chain-smoker like Kim Jeongchil swearing off cigarettes were about as good as striking oil out in the East Sea. He slipped quietly off the hospital bed and ambled through the wards. He hadn't smoked for a mere two days, and the itch felt like it would kill him.
"A cigarette..."
Already, the stage had arrived where everything in sight looked like a cigarette. The doctor had told him never to smoke, but words like that were useless on a smoker. Cigarettes weren't called a monstrously addictive drug for nothing. How else did you get the saying that even if one hand rotted off from smoking, you'd just light up with the other?
Kim Jeongchil stepped into the hospital convenience store and, out of habit, looked for cigarettes. Whether he had lung cancer or not, the first order of business was smoking one and killing this withdrawal. He meant to buy the This he usually smoked, but there wasn't a cigarette in sight.
"Huh...?"
The clerk was eyeing him, asking without words what he was looking for. At last Kim Jeongchil realized that the hospital convenience store didn't sell cigarettes. In their place, they were selling red ginseng extract. He ended up walking back out. He'd only gone in to buy cigarettes in the first place.
He decided it was a divine revelation telling him not to smoke. He ought to just stay off them and go back to his room. His family was worried sick over his lung cancer; lighting up would be a betrayal of that worry. He knew all too well that smoking was the leading cause of the disease. With faltering steps, he headed for his room.
"Haa..."
Kim Jeongchil turned his feet away from the hospital room and walked into a convenience store a short distance from the hospital after all. Just as addicts hunted for a fix until the day they died, he hadn't been able to beat the urge to smoke. He wanted to scold himself for being such a fool, but filling up on nicotine came first. The only time a chain-smoker like him went without a cigarette was when he was in the ground.
In other words, quitting would end only when Kim Jeongchil himself was dead. With a familiar glance, he moved to pick out a pack of This. An advertisement propped in front of the register, though, was pushing a new cigarette KT&G had just released.
The healthiest cigarette KT&G has ever made.
A clean cigarette. No toxic substances. No chemicals.
Nothing in it but nicotine.
"Nothing but nicotine...?"
It claimed to be the healthiest cigarette KT&G had ever put out—a clean cigarette, it said, with not a trace of toxic substances or chemicals. Hearing that, Kim Jeongchil couldn't help a dry little laugh. A cigarette was a cigarette. There was no such thing in the world as a cigarette that was good for the body. He was living proof. He'd smoked so much he'd gotten lung cancer.
Even so, it tempted him. If KT&G had gone all out to make a healthy cigarette, he figured he might as well try one. He spoke to the clerk.
"One pack of Starlight Cigarettes, please."
"That'll be 4,500 won."
The clerk handed them over with a practiced motion. Starlight Cigarettes, made by KT&G... He'd tried other foods from the Starlight line before, so part of him was looking forward to it. Nothing Starlight Foods made had ever disappointed him.
Even now, he was eating Starlight Cherry Tomatoes instead of the tasteless hospital meals. He was curious what a Starlight cigarette from KT&G would be like.
Kim Jeongchil tossed the plastic wrapper roughly into the trash, pulled out a single cigarette, and took a hard drag.