7
“Hey. When have you ever seen me before to call me crazy? Do you think you can avoid responsibility that way? You need to explain clearly. About what you people did to me. I’m not going to let this slide. You understand?”
“Cha Sukyung!”
“What are you talking about? Don’t go around changing other people’s names. I’m really going to get angry. Did you think I’d be grateful if you stuck me in this private room? Hurry up and find my balls. Seriously, they say people steal right in front of your eyes, but this is stealing my balls while my eyes were closed.”
“Good heavens.”
The man couldn’t continue and just gaped his mouth. As if he was too dumbfounded to speak. But wasn’t I the one who should be dumbfounded? Faced with this audacious man, I jumped up and hastily pulled down my pants.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Since you keep denying it, I’m going to show you. Do I look like I’m lying? I’m telling you my balls are really gone. The things that should be attached here have disappeared.”
The man quickly reached out and grabbed my hands and pants. A tug-of-war ensued between me trying to pull them down and him trying to stop me.
“Let go of this.”
“Secretary Yoon. Secretary Yoon! Get in here and calm this guy down. Tell the nurse to give him a sedative or something. And contact the hospital director. Call the attending physician or a psychiatrist, quickly!”
When the man shouted almost like a scream, a man who had been outside rushed in and pinned me down on the bed.
“Hey, can’t you let go? You think you’ll be fine after this? Grabbing someone like this, operating on them however you want, huh? And I’ll tell everyone about this imprisonment! I’ll make sure this hospital gets shut down!”
I struggled and shouted, while the man leaned against the sofa with an increasingly tired face. He muttered “Really crazy” while shaking his head, then glanced at me before turning his face away as if avoiding me.
Anyone watching would think I was acting crazy. A good example was the caregiver who was keeping her distance—even she was looking at me suspiciously. Is it this easy to frame someone as insane? A sense of futility washed over me.
I have no money, no parents, and have lived a miserable life, not to mention the cancer in my chest and not much time left to live. Then I saved a suicidal guy thinking I was doing a good deed, only to find my balls have disappeared. On top of that, I’m being treated like I’m crazy and might end up in a mental hospital.
Is this what they want? Are they trying to get rid of me this way? But why? What did I do wrong? I only saved the life of their family member, that nameless guy.
Was it that hard to say thank you and give me a little compensation? Did I look like I was going to demand some enormous reward? I really couldn’t understand.
“I’ll stay still, so let go of me.”
I spoke grumpily to the man still pinning me down. Hearing my calmer tone, the man glanced at the other man, and I once again demanded in a stronger voice to be released.
“Hold him until the nurse comes. I won’t feel safe until he gets a sedative.”
“Listen. What you’re doing is a real crime. You know that, right?”
“Hah… I’ll go contact the hospital director, so keep holding him. So he can’t escape anywhere.”
To witness a crime in real-time. And I’m the victim.
But if there’s a separate father who’s the hospital director, then who is this person? Is he one of the two older brothers the guy mentioned disliking? Since he said there was an age gap, it’s not impossible. Based on what I’ve heard from the guy, it’s entirely possible that his brother would treat me this way. They were supposed to be real jerks.
The man left the room, and the secretary continued to hold me down, while the caregiver kept glancing in our direction from a distance, trying to understand the situation.
I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart, and noticing that the force holding me down had weakened slightly, I pushed the man on top of me with all my strength.
“Whoa.”
As the man staggered back a step, I seized the opportunity and rolled off the bed. The man would be outside the door, and the only place to escape was the bathroom. Before the secretary could grab me again, I quickly ran, almost crawling across the floor, into the bathroom and locked the door.
Bang, bang, the sound of someone pounding on the door from outside echoed. I could also hear the man’s voice, who had apparently entered the room, shouting and asking what was happening.
It’s me who should be curious about what’s going on. What on earth is happening? What is this hospital doing? What situation am I in? I couldn’t understand any of it.
I forced strength into my increasingly weakening knees and took deep breaths. I saved someone else’s life and now my own life is in danger. What a dog’s life situation. Even though I don’t have much time left, I didn’t want to end it in such a miserable way.
Think. Just think. Think.
No matter how much I tried to calm down, I couldn’t. The situation made no sense, and I had no idea what to do or how to do it.
“Fuck!”
I cursed as I stood in front of the sink. I needed to wash my face with cold water to clear my head. The ice-cold water on my face shocked me awake. After roughly washing my face and drying it with a hanging towel, I looked in the mirror and froze like a statue.
What the hell?
The face in the mirror was utterly unfamiliar.
It’s not a face I’ve never seen before. It’s definitely a face I know, but it’s not the face I’ve seen for twenty years of my life.
How did this happen? The face in the mirror wasn’t mine—it was the face of the guy whose life I had risked my own to save.
Hesitantly, I raised one hand, and the guy in the mirror also raised his hand. When I waved as if greeting someone, the guy also waved.
Is this a dream? I pinched my cheek with my fingers and winced in pain, and as if mimicking me, the guy in the mirror also pinched his cheek and his eyes welled up with tears.
“This is insane, what is this?”
These people must be truly crazy. They not only removed my balls but also changed my face to look like his. Could plastic surgery create such a perfect replica of someone else’s face?
I moved closer to the mirror and touched my face. The skin under my fingertips was smooth, as if it wasn’t mine. I felt a strange sense of alienation.
As if hypnotized, I stripped off all the clothes I was wearing.
This isn’t the emaciated body I had due to illness. While still small in build, it wasn’t a body that had lost weight due to illness, just a naturally thin one.
The scar on my side was gone too. When was it, fourteen? The scar from being stabbed as an example after being caught crossing territory lines while pickpocketing had disappeared. It had left a large scar because a quack had stitched it carelessly, but now my side was clean as if such a thing had never happened.
Other small scars were nowhere to be found either. My stomach and the skin on my arms and legs were all clean. Even my hands, which had been rough from hardship, were now soft and supple like a child’s. It was the body of a young master who had been raised with care.
Did they perform plastic surgery all over my body?
This makes no sense. How many days have I been unconscious and hospitalized here? How long does it take for all traces of extensive plastic surgery to disappear completely?
There wasn’t a single stitch mark anywhere. Apart from some bruising as if from minor contusions, there were no marks from injuries or surgery. If they had performed plastic surgery on my entire body, shouldn’t there be at least some surgical scars?
The genitals that strangely felt smaller, on closer inspection, weren’t mine either. The area below where my testicles should have been was smooth as if they had never existed. There were no marks from cutting or stitching.
Come to think of it, my voice was strange too. I had thought it sounded unfamiliar because my head was dizzy, my ears felt stuffy, and my throat was hoarse, but on reflection, it was different from a hoarse voice. Unlike my original voice, it was thin and clear, a beautiful voice.
Non-existent testicles. A completely changed body. A face that wasn’t mine. A voice that wasn’t mine. How could this be explained?
Am I really Min Jaehee? Anyone looking at me would easily mistake me for that guy whose name I don’t even know.
The reaction of the man outside made sense now. If that man truly didn’t know what was going on, and he was mistaking me for that guy, then from his perspective, it would make sense to think I was crazy.
“This doesn’t make any sense.”
Who created this situation? Who turned me into that guy?
Could it be that the guy who said he didn’t want to live took advantage of my unconsciousness to switch places with me? Since his parents were supposedly hospital directors, it was entirely possible.
But why would those parents agree to it? What benefit would they get from turning a street pickpocket who barely finished elementary school into their son?
Why is the man outside pretending not to know about this situation? Wouldn’t it be easier to explain the situation to me, help me understand, and persuade me? Does he think it’s more convenient and less risky to label me insane and lock me in a mental hospital?
Absurd conspiracy theories grew rapidly in my mind.
While I was blankly staring at the guy in the mirror, the bathroom door made a clicking sound. The banging had stopped, and it had gone quiet, but then the door handle rattled and the lock was released.
The man who peered through the smoothly opening bathroom door gap saw me and silently gaped his mouth. His wide, surprised eyes looked me up and down my naked body.
Through the wide-open bathroom door, I could see the man, his secretary, and the caregiver all staring at me.
“…N-nurse. Nurse!”
The man called for a nurse in what sounded like a scream. Hearing the ear-piercing voice, I lowered my gaze from the mirror and closed my eyes.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
