by Yun Ko-Eun
‘Luck? You mean the Luck who works at this resort?’ the manager asked in surprise when Yona notified him about the unexpected addition. She explained that Luck’s knowledge of Mui’s old legends and natural features was vital to the success of this new Jungle trip.
‘That guy has a very important role now, doesn’t he . . .’ the manager mused. ‘What is it you are really asking for?’
Yona lowered her head to keep him from seeing her face. Maybe, as manager, he could do something about the situation. ‘Please, don’t harm Luck,’ she said. She didn’t want Luck to die while she was safe in Korea; she didn’t want that kind of ending.
The manager looked at Yona for a long time. His incredulous expression showed that he hadn’t expected a request like this.
‘The screenplay will have to be changed quite a bit,’ he said. ‘You won’t mind?’
Yona nodded her head. Eight-one per cent of the world’s natural disasters over the past ten years had been floods and typhoons, and the disasters that caused the most casualties were earthquakes. But to Yona, those had just become work. Now, she faced a greater disaster: her feelings. Yona felt uneasy, like her emotions were a landmine that could explode at any moment. She didn’t want the manager to see how vulnerable she was. The manager was no different to manager Kim. She might as well still be back in the Jungle offices. Yona didn’t have the freedom to do anything but nod in agreement.
* * *
It was the first week of August. The clock ticked closer and closer to Sunday, and Yona’s chest constricted whenever she thought about it.
But at least she know knew that Luck was going to stay safe from this disaster. The manager said that he would send Luck to Vietnam on the day of the incident. When Yona thought about Luck surviving Mui Sunday, she could breathe again. It felt like a closed window, trapping stale air inside, had opened again. That evening she was going on one last tour of the island with Luck.
The drove out to the desert, and when they parked and started walking, Yona told Luck that her work was now finished. Their excursions around Mui by motorcycle could have ended ages ago, and Luck knew that they were just circling between the same places over and over again on this narrow island.
‘Are you going home now?’ Luck asked.
‘Probably …
‘Shall we go together, Luck?’ Yona asked. The words bounced out of her mouth before her brain could give permission. Of course, it was true that Yona wanted Luck to come with her. But he probably wouldn’t be able to leave. They’d only spent three weeks together. If she went back to Korea with Luck, what would they do next? She was afraid. She stared up at the stars. Her question for Luck swirled in her ears, an echo in empty air.
The incomplete tower stood like a lighthouse above the desert. If you shone a flashlight down from the tower’s peak, you couldn’t see the sand below. Similarly, if you shot a flashlight up from the bottom, the light wouldn’t reach the top. Luck spoke amid the endless dark.
‘Scientists have filmed a video that records a brain thinking. Have you seen it?’
‘Uh …’ Yona replied, puzzled.
‘I’ve seen it. When someone begins to have a thought, a lot of changes occur inside the brain. The video captures that, and it looks exactly like a Christmas tree. The lights in the brain turn on and off, shining and then extinguishing. They twinkle.’
‘Have you even seen a Christmas tree before? This is a tropical country.’
‘What place doesn’t have Christmas?’ Luck asked, then smiled. ‘Actually,’ he continued, ‘I only saw a Christmas tree in person after the resort was built. I’ve seen a lot more stars than I have trees. Now that I think about it, that video of a brain looked like the sky. White stars twinkling on a black background.’
Yona followed Luck’s gaze towards the night sky. In the next moment, she began to cry as she listened to his unsteady voice.
‘When I think about you after we part,’ Luck said, ‘my head is going to fill with those twinkling stars. Neither of us will be able to see them, but they’ll definitely be shining.’
In the quiet, early hours of morning, Luck and Yona gazed up at a sky full of stars shooting in all different directions, as endless desert cactuses stood sentry around them. Luck looked at Yona with eyes full of tears. As the sun peeked over the horizon, he murmured that he’d miss her.
With that, another day in Mui began. That was the last time they saw each other.
Mui moved according to plan. Local fishermen were catching unexpected numbers of fish in their nets, as if nerves about the upcoming disaster were making the fish especially dozy. The sudden harvest surprised the fishermen, but they couldn’t complain about it. Streets bustled with people pulling wheelbarrows full of the dead fish. Others could be seen hanging CCTV cameras on the desert tower and roads nearby, like they were decorating Christmas trees. Warning alarms appeared all over the place, like they were an animal infestation. Among generally smooth progress, some small problems occurred. Certain people disappeared. They died, or they left the island—no one knew exactly what had happened. Man 11, Woman 15 and Woman 16’s roles were now unfilled. But the lack of a few characters wouldn’t stop the gears from changing. Other Mui residents eventually filled the empty positions.
Yona had now witnessed several traffic accidents, and they weren’t as shocking as at the beginning. But recently, the victims’ faces had started to look a little more familiar. One of them belonged to the woman who had come to Yona’s bungalow to ask about the crocodiles. Yona saw the woman being hit by a yellow truck, but she wasn’t certain if it was a dream or if it was real. The woman had definitely disappeared. At some point, Yona stopped seeing her shadow wandering phantom-like around the resort.
‘We just have to solve the crocodile problem,’ the manager told Yona. ‘If we throw bait at them, they’ll all gather in the same place. We’ll give them what they’ve always wanted—residence permits—and they won’t be able to resist, will they?
This was exactly what the woman had wanted to figure out: how the crocodiles would be driven towards their deaths.
The manager’s words fitted into the big picture Yona was drawing in her mind. Yona tried to dull her feelings about the script, but occasionally the first Sunday of August appeared in her dreams. In the dreams, the crocodiles gathered two hours before the field day, overjoyed to have been given residence permits. Then the ground collapsed beneath their feet, opening the pits of hell.
It wasn’t a dream, it was the future.
The only time that Yona felt untethered from this future was when she thought about Luck. Of course, this wasn’t a perfect solution for her anxiety. When she thought about Luck, the crocodiles came to mind, too. Once Luck left for his business trip to Vietnam, running errands for the manager, Yona felt relieved. Luck wouldn’t return until after everything was over. But her calm didn’t last long. Mail arrived for Yona, filling another part of the puzzle in her mind, but it wasn’t the residence permit she’d been waiting for. Inside the envelope bearing Paul’s logo, a white image on a yellow background, was an unexpected sentence.
‘You have been hired as Crocodile 75. You have no assigned lines. As compensation for your employment, three hundred dollars will be deposited into your bank account at the time of the performance.’
Yona checked the inside and outside of the envelope again. She couldn’t find any instructions other than the sentence she’d just read. The addressee was clearly labelled ‘Yona Ko’. Yona’s heart beat quickly. What did this mean, Crocodile 75? Was it the same kind of role as Woman 1 or Woman 2 or Woman 3? Yona recalled what the woman had told her, the woman who’d visited her bungalow before disappearing: everyone assigned the parts from Crocodile 70 to Crocodile 450 is going die for nothing. These crocodiles don’t have lines. They’re not even practising; they’re just going to die.
Clearly this envelope had been sent to Yona by mistake. Yona needed her residence permit, not an employment contract. And her life was wort
h more than three hundred dollars. Time was falling towards Yona like water.
Yona took the envelope outside and began to run. It was pouring with rain and she had nowhere to go, but she kept running. The people she passed as she ran tormented her; all of them seemed to be staring at her, repeating in unison, ‘That woman is Crocodile 75.’ She looked for the manager, but he wasn’t in his office. The door to the writer’s bungalow was also firmly shut. Several menacing bits of graffiti decorated his door. Disgruntled actors, dissatisfied with or afraid of their roles, must have already stopped by. The writer couldn’t have been trying to dispose of Yona with this bit part. Didn’t they share the same homeland? Someone had made a mistake. Yona already had a role: the role of Yona. Crocodile 75—what did this mean? She called the phone number of the person in charge, written at the bottom of the envelope. The call connected quickly to her ‘manager’, Man 34, but he gave her an unremarkable answer.
‘I was just directed to relay your role to you,’ he said. ‘That’s my job. Why? I don’t know. I’m not in charge there. Plans that big, I don’t really . . .’
No matter who Yona called, she got the same answer—from someone who was probably wearing a Paul hat and vest. ‘I don’t know what comes next. I only manage this part,’ or ‘I don’t have control over that. I’m just in charge here,’ or ‘That’s not my job; I’ll connect you to the department in charge,’ or ‘Oh, the call got cut off? I’ll connect you again.’
But eventually, the phone connected not to Paul but to Jungle’s customer satisfaction centre.
‘I’m waiting for my Mui residence permit,’ Yona wanted to say. ‘If you can’t give me that, you can just send me back to Korea now. Why did I have to be hired as Crocodile 75? I never wanted this role.’
Instead, Yona said, ‘I want to return to Korea.’ On the other end of the line, she heard the computer keyboard clacking, quickly and cheerfully. It sounded like a card reader crudely spitting out a receipt. For some reason, the noise calmed Yona. The person on the other end spoke amid the clacking.
‘You must have already read the terms,’ she said, ‘but you can’t cancel a trip after it’s started.’
‘I don’t need to be refunded. I don’t need anything. Just arrange for me to return, please.’
‘I’m not talking about a refund. You can’t cancel a trip that’s currently under way. You have to stay at your destination until the specified end date.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s what the terms say.’
The computer noises coming from the Jungle office sounded both familiar and unfamiliar to Yona.
‘If I’m sick, or a problem occurs, can’t I just return to Korea?’
‘Ma’am, you entered into a contract with different stipulations than a normal traveller. This is a business trip. You didn’t pay for the travel costs. Since Jungle considers this a business trip, you can’t suspend it in the middle.’
‘Can you please connect me to Team Leader Kim? I want to talk to him directly.’
‘He no longer works here.’
Yona’s mind was fading to white. When she asked again, the woman repeated that Kim had left Jungle, and she wasn’t authorised to tell her why. Yona hurriedly tried to call Lou, the guide from her trip. But Lou was in the middle of another programme, and the Jungle employee on the phone said Yona couldn’t contact her. Yona had no one else to turn to. So she said into the receiver, ‘Okay, I’ll quit, too. I’ll quit so I can finally do what I want.’
‘According to the rules, it’s only possible for you to quit in the middle of a business trip if you die.’
‘Please.’
‘I’ll have to check if it’s possible to quit in other situations. I’ll get in touch when I find out.’
With that, the phone call ended. Yona knew the woman wouldn’t check.
When she flopped on to her couch, she looked up at the ceiling fan. Its eight outstretched legs glared down at her. Yona pressed the ‘do not disturb’ button on her eyelid remote control. But the bungalow’s eyelids didn’t lower. No matter how many times she pressed on the remote control, it wouldn’t do anything.
Yona stared out at the darkening sky. It looked like letters had been written in the dusk air. Maybe something was wrong with her eyes, or her mood was making her see things. She closed and opened her eyes repeatedly, until she saw that the hazy letters read backwards. If they really were letters, the intended reader wasn’t Yona.
As she looked at the letters, flipped backwards and impossible to read, Yona thought about other things that had been chaotically turned around. Like the script’s tragic romance between her and Luck. Had telling the manager about her feelings for Luck changed her fate? When the manager asked if I’d mind him editing the screenplay, is this what he meant? Yona brushed her arms, covered with goosebumps. The back of her neck grew chilly. The writer had said that Paul wanted a tragic love story. Yona had asked him and the manager not to kill Luck. Does that mean I’m the person they’ve decided to kill? Had they decided that they had to kill one of the two lovers? Countless potential endings for Yona’s relationship with Luck swirled inside her mind. She thought back to the website that told you the date of your death. Then, everything collapsed.
Yona’s remaining lifespan was decreasing even now. That wasn’t a surprise. But Crocodile 75? She thought she heard a knocking noise, and her chest sank. Yona went to the door.
‘Luck?
‘Luck?’
Even though she knew that Luck had gone on a trip, Yona hoped fervently that he was the one knocking. But when she opened the door, no one was there. Terrified, Yona began to run. She ran until she reached the strangler fig tree. There she saw something, hanging from the tree’s branches. Dangling from the tree was the shoe she’d thrown out after the other two in her pair and a half were stolen. Yona didn’t know why it was here now. Next, the child’s sketchbook came into view. The drawings made by the teacher’s daughter so long ago. Pages of the book turned over one by one in the wind. They looked like storyboards for an animated movie and Yona began to make out the pictures. They depicted things she’d seen or heard about on Mui. There was a sketch of the old dog that was always lying apathetically, here standing up and then running, following a smell, running into the sinkhole. Then it was dead. The dog ran into the hole, and after that, people gathered round and talked about what a faithful pet he had been.
Someone wearing a Paul hat that covered their face appeared and slammed the sketchbook shut. But when they lifted their head and turned to Yona, she saw her own lips under the hat, her own nose and her own eyes: familiar but unrecognisable. Slightly creased eyelids, brown irises, wet eyes. Yona froze in terror.
‘Ask Paul,’ said the figure. ‘But Paul doesn’t actually exist—didn’t you know that?’
Yona’s legs buckled, and she flopped to the ground. Her doppelganger began to run between the trees. If she didn’t chase after herself, she’d be trapped, she thought. While Yona was running, black crabs crawled up from the sea in great numbers, and birds began to fill the sky. The palm trees shooting up like totem poles, the hidden forest beasts cried out. The forest was suddenly lit by two headlights, which charged forward and struck Yona. She collapsed, and when the headlights reversed and then accelerated again, Yona barely lifted her head. All she saw was yellow beams, glaring angrily at her. She glared back, but then the mass of iron crushed her slender body.
•
Time freezes. Two half-open windows appear before Yona; they let early morning light into the vehicle. Two eyelids, half-closed, or maybe half-open. Yona faces the window and stretches out her arm. Where did I go wrong? she wonders. Now she runs down a road with thick electrical lines stretched out above her, runs back to the starting point of her trip. She follows these electrical lines that look like tangles of hair, passing Mui’s alleys, towards the sea, and now she’s somehow going backwards down all the routes she traversed while in Mui. The moment that made everything go wrong: Yona fumbles ar
ound in her mind to find that point. But this is the culmination of countless, interconnected moments. This isn’t my job, Yona mumbles resentfully, and then she encounters an inexplicable feeling of peace. Luck surviving instead of her—it’s a blessing. Yona’s body flows over the peaks and valleys of an emotion she hadn’t believed she could feel until now: gratitude. Her eyes close halfway and then begin to pulsate. Do the pulsations mean that she is ready to die? Or are they an order: pretend this is not happening, because I’m still dreaming?
Yona forced her eyes open one last time, and then closed them. The sandy wind blew over her cheeks. That was how Crocodile 75 died.
7
MUI SUNDAY
THE WRITER WALKED OUT of the manager’s office. Even at the resort, it was the only place with an internet connection. After staying up all night to finish the script and send it off, he wanted to check that his payment had been deposited. Today was Friday. The writer returned to his bungalow—passing dozens of ugly graffitied insults as he walked through the front door—closed his eyes, and immediately fell asleep. How long had it been since he’d slept so deeply? The two glasses of whisky he’d gulped down earlier helped him drift off into slumber.
On Saturday morning, the writer ate breakfast in the dining hall for the first time in a while, but he didn’t see Yona. When he still hadn’t run into her by early afternoon, he began to suspect that something was wrong. The eyelids on the front of Yona’s bungalow were lowered, the curtains closed. The surrounding area was quiet, as if it had been frozen overnight; if you looked down, though, frantically moving creatures covered the ground. Fish had washed up onshore, and olive-coloured crabs crawled on to the sand in great numbers. The shore extended further out than usual, exposing the ocean floor. The sun shone down on an island already cleansed of last night’s events.