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Wonwoo read a lot of adults-have-completely-disappeared-and-now-children-are-in-charge books as a kid. The plots and the characters are now fuzzy in Wonwoo’s memory, except for one.
It started off quite light-hearted, with a joyous bunch of kids drunk on newfound freedom, exploring the silent city and arguably spending very little time worrying about what could have happened to everyone else.
After a while though, they grew more and more weary of the cracks appearing in the concrete as unused pipework caused the entire plumbing system to swell. With the youngest ones tied to their backs, they climbed buildings from the outside and established a camp on top of the skyscrapers, skipping from one roof to the other to find cans and rainwater.
Eventually, water burst through the cement and slowly started to rise.
It didn’t sound scary at first, and Wonwoo pictured the place becoming a lagoon, foam as its white veins instead of urban night lights, and empty buildings as the corals floating in the perpetual stream.
Instead, the water, used and frustrated, stained the soil black and angry. No way out, no loopholes, no deus ex machina, even as the children desperately moved from one camp to the next. Not even as they reached the highest stop and watched their world being swallowed in that opaque, almost solid mass. Not even as they clasped their hands firmly in one another. Not even as they stood frozen in fear as it devoured the streets, the cars, and poured through windows left opened. Not even as they held each other tight. Not even as the cold matter wrapped itself around their ankles and pulled them under.
At last, they drowned. Joints white and lungs filled.
Wonwoo doesn’t remember their names now, but the unease resurfaces at times, rising and holding firmly to his ribs.
**
The version of the apocalypse that’s assigned to Wonwoo is both alien and a flipped coin of the tale of the submerged city.
“How so?” Chan asks when Wonwoo mentions it on the roof, while he’s tending to the vegetable garden.
It’s too warm for what should be early spring, and Chan is wiping away sweat beading on his temples. Seeing Chan frowning as if cutting a couple of rebel leaves, as if the tomato plants were worth that much time and intent, never fails to warm him inside.
Wonwoo is supervising from the stairs, as if Chan still needed help with the plants. It’s nice to pretend that he does sometimes. And it’s a sure way for Wonwoo to look at Chan as much as he wants, without having to dodge his inquiring gaze. It’s also nice not to have to pretend.
Wonwoo frowns, a mirror of Chan’s expression as he focuses on the question at hand.
First, they’re both on the roof of one of the buildings still high enough to avoid turning, like the children in the story.
Second, people are not gone. They’re melted by the spores to their very core and then melded back into another version of themselves. A rawer, hungrier one, wandering on the asphalt endlessly. Or, at least, that’s the polite way to say it.
“They’re people, Wonwoo hyung,” Chan hissed with hurt when Wonwoo suggested capturing one for research, pupils blown as if he had lost his mind.
Third, both like and unlike the story, the tide is absolution. Drowned bodies don’t come back. The reason is not completely clear but Wonwoo’s guess goes to the flabby flesh. It doesn’t offer enough grasp for the Hunger, no asperities for the spores to colonise and grow.
“True,” Chan acknowledges, dropping the tools with a huff to follow their conversation. He sits crossed-legged on the soil, in between the cabbages and a row of what should be onions. Purple mould is forming on wilted leaves despite their best efforts to keep the mildew at bay. Wonwoo winces, but the rainwater tank volume is at an all-time low and they have to prioritise what plants will survive the humid heat.
Chan frowns again, but it’s hesitant, uncertain. As if he wanted to say something but didn’t quite know how to. Wonwoo pushes back his fractured glasses and tries to relax his expression. There is nothing you could say that would make me change my mind about you.
Chan found a few bodies, he tells Wonwoo. Some huddled together in the tiny rectangular bathtubs or their heads only plunged in the bright plastic baskets while the rest of their body was laid out on the white-turned-yellowish tiles.
“Did they have any marks of turning?” Wonwoo asks, confused.
Chan nods with a pout. Cute. “Early signs. Fungus under their tongues and yellow pupils.”
“Uh. It’s not unusual then,” Wonwoo thinks out loud. He says in what he hopes is an empathetic tone, “It must have been hard to do it by themselves.”
Chan shrugs and squints against the sun. “I’m not sure if that’s what matters here, hyung.”
It’s said without judgement. Chan always forgives the day that came and closes his eyes tight when the night falls, ready to cherish the day that comes. That’s one of the many things he admires in Chan. And what makes him so cut-out to survive. Months later, it still comes as a surprise. Thinking that Chan finds use in him.
You borrowed that one from me, Seungkwan huffs.
What?
The day that came, Seungkwan says in mock indignation. Or maybe real indignation. It’s not Wonwoo’s fault. The voices have intertwined themselves so closely with Wonwoo’s internal voice that it’s become harder and harder to tell them apart. They can be biting at times, mean even, but they feel like kindness in the silence anyway.
Wonwoo hasn’t met many survivors but even if he had, Chan would still be the protagonist of this apocalypse. Wonwoo has half-scribbled notes, a database of disaster scenarios and enough fruits under his hands not to die of scurvy, but it’s insignificant when juxtaposed against Chan crawling on the floors of goshiwons, covered in hungry entrails and with the mix of dust and salt that coats the furniture and the streets in a pale, fuzzy dream, smudged on his cheeks.
Wonwoo wonders what Chan looked like then.
The present version of Chan has sun-bleached hair framing his face but his dark roots are bordering on shaggy. Wonwoo wonders how Chan looks with black hair. Maybe he’ll get to see it soon. Or Chan will let him dye it again. In the blue bathroom perhaps, the one where the chamomile flowers on the paper wall seem to blossom after a point in the afternoon. It pains him to think that there are versions of Chan that are forever lost to time and to the ghost city. He holds this version of Chan, an in-between, close to his heart.
Chan is now busying himself with the colony of aphids eating its way through two thirds of their lettuce. He captures them gently in his hands, even though bug legs freak him out and spasms running through his fingers clearly show that he’s holding himself back from crushing them between his palms.
Beyond the flexibility and the grace in his step, kindness is something else that sets them apart. Wonwoo wants to know. Chan wants to understand. Chan wants to help. Chan forgives. Wonwoo winces. Forgiving is the wrong word to use, he knows, but old habits die hard. Forgiving is infused with self-rightness; implying there is something to be forgiven for. People can’t be hated for simply being what they are, Seungkwan agrees.
Wonwoo is not sure about the stream being absolution anymore. He used to consider it as the very last resort to avoid turning, before the hunger could feel your fear and steal your breath away.
Chan doesn’t. Chan thinks of ways to rehabilitate people, to offer them an alternative even when all they can reply are guttural laments and the sizzle of their flesh under the ultraviolets, loud enough to overpower the shrills of cicadas in the summer. Chan watches the crowd of hungry crawling under their windows, their jaws gone slack in want, and his brows knitted in worry.
Not for him, but for them.
**
On the morning after the night devours the world, Wonwoo knows better than to move from the hotel when lines of cars stretch themselves out in the streets and try to reach the countryside or loved ones – sometimes both. Instead, Wonwoo’s feet stay glued by the French windows. He remembers it the same way one remembers souvenirs anchored by a picture, as if a soul were stuck in one corner of the room, observing that other but also simultaneous version of him, bathrobe poorly fastened and hand hesitantly opening the curtains.
He throws up in his room’s bin, wipes his mouth and gets to work. He waits for the hotel to empty out in panic and barricades the lower floors. He knows how that sounds – awful, Chan would probably say – but Wonwoo knows his chances to make it out alive. Or rather, how slight they are. Old scenarios and sequences come back quickly to him, remnants of his childhood, and securing water and food come as top priorities. He doesn’t exactly have a subscription to a survivalist magazine, but the hypothesis of the world going berserk always loomed in a corner of his mind, whispering if everything were to end, what would you do?
But this is unlike anything he could have imagined.
Years later, he watches Chan sprawl over their sheets and, uh, that wasn’t in the original plan, to say the least. It should have prepared him better, spending afternoons reading, stomach flat against the wooden floor.
“G’d morning,” Chan slurs, rubbing the salt out of his eyelids. Intimacy burns raw in Lee Chan’s sleepy morning eyes, reduced to barely more than a slice of sun over the horizon, and Wonwoo doesn’t have to close his for the pressure of lips to manifest like a phantom limb.
It’s not fair to either of them.
Wonwoo pretends to see the dots connect when Chan compares their notes and in exchange, shudders when he pulls him in.
It’s merely a bodily function. Solitude cloaks over them like lead, and Chan condenses within him the ties one would normally form with ten, fifteen people. Almost against themselves, their rolled-sleeves arms brush when they do the dishes and Chan leans in insistently to mimic the pressure of the water, bridging the distance that separates their sides. It’s fine. If Wonwoo can’t give him the reason the world has changed, then this is the best he can do, letting the edges of their bodies firm up.
He chuckles humourlessly.
Desperation is a new look on him.
I’m worried that you’ll always be a spectator to your own life. If only they could see him now. It leaves a sour aftertaste in his mouth, the fact that the apocalypse gave him something he couldn’t afford to lose.
It’s probably an inappropriate thought to have. People died, Wonwoo hyung, Seungkwan says in his clipped intonation. But somehow, not unkind. Just the tiniest bit judgemental.
It’s fine. Wonwoo doesn’t mind.
**
It’s Chan who makes him notice.
“See, hyung, here too,” he says, flipping the pages of the notebook in undisguised enthusiasm. He is reading Wonwoo’s notes and comparing them with his own, trying to find a detail they could have missed. “Your entries all end with salt.”
It’s true.
“After reaching full maturity (or when confronted to high temperatures) the hungry release spores within a ray of 5-10 meters (up to 12 exceptionally). What’s left is merely a shell, as if all moisture were collected by time and heat. Such behaviour would in classical apocalypse scenarios signify amplified contamination rates and lead to further infections (expected shift from physical contact to airborne), but contact has been reported with healthy unturned individuals without resulting in turning. Further research is needed, but the residue is qualified as “benign” before the finding of contrary evidence.
After the settling of the spores, traces of the metamorphosis are left on the ground (white, fine grains) whose properties and taste appear close to salt. / (…) These days, the morning’s sun tastes like the sea. / (…) The spores don’t reach the vascular system of the plants by air-contact either. The cause of the apparition of holes and associated stains is found to be the watering with water contaminated with hungry salt. Could turning be caused by consumption of contaminated vegetables? Change of protocol. Remember to cover the plantations when it’s about to rain + to br ush the leaves if forgotten. / (…) Your salty-salty expression, your animal loo gaze, like a lonely island hame hammered by the sea.”
Wonwoo tears the notes away from Chan’s hands, blushing.
“You don’t need to read all of it, you know,” Wonwoo says, still clutching the notebook against his chest. “I can underline the important bits.”
Chan recoils in what could be hurt (stupid, Chan’s forgiveness exceeds far beyond the bounds of the lost city).
“I don’t know,” Chan says quietly, “But I wish I did.” He frowns, and it’s both a little bit miserable and very endearing. Chan always lays out the barest parts of himself without a second thought.
The hints of stubbornness in his tone are the same as when Chan insists that it matters to try to get rid of the cockroaches crawling in the sink of the kitchen, even if squashing them until their fists are painted purple is a sure recipe to call for more of its congeners. See, sometimes trying harder only causes more hurt, Wonwoo wants to say. It doesn’t matter anymore. Not when there is no one else but me to see.
Somehow, Wonwoo has a strong sense that it’s not a trait Chan acquired with the world’s end. If it has shaped people in the most jaded, sharp version of themselves, Chan has always been the type to apply pressure on his bruises, kneading the pain with spread out fingers and admiring their kaleidoscopic fadeout under the prism of a microscope light.
The flattening of Wonwoo’s mouth and the twitch of his fingers must translate as irritation. Chan replies, “I know we’re both trying to understand.”
It’s maybe the empty rainwater tank. Or the mouldy onion plants. Or the heat that’s hammering their skulls relentlessly. Or the cries of the hungries, climbing on each other until they reach the third floor, fall, and try again. Wonwoo swallows, unsettled. There’s newfound urgency in both of their tones.
“But what if there is no remedy?” Wonwoo says tentatively, mouth dry. “What if this is it?”
The books always ended with a moral, something for the reader to learn. What if this one doesn’t? It’s somehow even more unbearable of a thought.
Chan thinks about it, cross-legged on the tiled floor. Long enough for Wonwoo to taste the bile under his tongue. Forget I said anything, we can keep on searching, there are sectors we can still explore, samples we can analyse, meals we can cook together, patches of your skins I haven’t touched yet-
“I think it’s fine?” Chan shrugs in honest, “Finding a cure wasn’t really the point for me anyway.”
“I see,” Wonwoo says.
He doesn’t. It feels like the fork in their paths, the first knot escalating into a future where Chan too would be gone. Greed compresses his throat, his ribcage. But what is it that you really want? He hears.
The answer comes easier than he’d thought. A secret he barely kept from himself. Hidden in plain sight really. He’d want nothing more than survivors to find their bones intertwined under the soil, ribs fused by the minerals and the fertilisers.
What do you think? Wonwoo asks, but Seungkwan doesn’t reply for once. Silence rings in the kitchen like sound approval, at last, at last, at last and then chimes away.