9
While a man in hospital staff uniform anxiously contacted someone, I stood quietly listening to him and couldn’t hide my shock at several things I was beginning to realize.
First, the man I thought was the guy’s brother might actually be his other parent. Second, both of the guy’s parents were men. Third, that would mean this man had given birth to the guy. Lastly, what shocked me the most was the word “corpse.”
I had thought the guy was alive and hiding somewhere. We had fallen from the overpass together, and even though I had been hit by an oncoming car, I was perfectly fine. So I hadn’t expected at all that he might have died. But a corpse?
“This way, please.”
The staff member, having apparently finished his conversation, led us to a large metal door. As we entered through the wide-open door, the air became even cooler than before. I immediately recognized that this was a morgue.
The employee opened one of the doors on what looked like a large refrigerator and pulled out what was inside. A flat metal table, something on top of it, and a white cloth covering that something. Without being told, I knew it was a corpse.
“Look at it. Then you’ll realize how absurd and crazy your claims are.”
The man pointed at the white cloth covering the corpse, and I approached as if drawn to it and grabbed the edge of the cloth. For some reason, my fingertips trembled.
As I gradually pulled down the cloth, bluish skin was revealed underneath. Legs, abdomen, arms, and chest, all tattered with wounds. And as the white cloth fell to the floor, the face that had been hidden appeared.
Although the body was crushed, broken, and a complete mess, the face wasn’t difficult to recognize. It was the face I had seen in the mirror every day during my twenty years of life. I couldn’t hide my shock as I stood before my own corpse.
I was standing right here, yet it was hard to accept my corpse lying in front of me. My legs wobbled, and I had to grab the table where the corpse lay.
“Why am I… Why am I here? What is this? What the hell is this! I’m standing right here, so why is my corpse… Did the guy die and swap faces with me?”
“Please! Please stop this insanity!”
“Then what is this! Why am I here…”
This doesn’t make sense. I’m clearly alive like this, so how can my corpse be here… It doesn’t make sense. Maybe the guy died and they switched our faces? …But what would they gain from that? What would they possibly gain from going that far? What is this nonsensical situation?
“This person died instantly at the scene. You fell onto the road, and it seems this person was hit by an oncoming car. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately given your current state—anyway, unlike this person, you didn’t have major injuries. That’s why this person is lying here as a corpse, and you’re standing perfectly fine. So how about stopping this crazy talk about you being this person?”
“…”
“What? You’re not planning to spout more nonsense, are you? How about we end this family disgrace here? I can’t even imagine how far you’re willing to go.”
Despite the man’s scathing remarks, I couldn’t think of a response. I was clearly here, but I was at a loss for how to explain the situation of seeing my own corpse with my own eyes.
My hands gripping the table trembled. Bile rose from my throat. Unable to hold it back, I vomited it onto the floor, and the man watching clicked his tongue, “tsk, tsk.”
“I have… cancer in my chest. I don’t have much time left to live. Do you know that?”
“What are you talking about now? You don’t have any disease.”
“No, I’m going to die soon. I don’t know what this situation is or what you people want from me… but I’m terminally ill and could die at any moment.”
The man sighed deeply, “Haah,” and replied, “Fine.”
“If you want, we can take chest scans too. I’ll do anything if it will make you stop this nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense! I…”
I’m really not Cha Sukyung. I’m Min Jaehee. But those claims felt stuck in my throat and wouldn’t come out.
The doctor standing beside me gently wrapped an arm around my slumped shoulders and patted me. For some reason, the warmth of a stranger made tears well up.
“I… So who am I to you? What’s our relationship?”
“Now you’re going to claim multiple personality disorder and amnesia too?”
“Please! Just answer my question. What relationship do you have with me? What is your relationship with Cha Sukyung…”
“The person who gave birth to you. Your father. It seems you don’t want to acknowledge it, and neither do I, so let’s move past that.”
“Ha…”
Could there be a more ridiculous farce? Standing in front of my corpse, with Cha Sukyung’s face, I blankly stared at the man who claimed to be Cha Sukyung’s father.
“Check my chest… Take a CT scan or an MRI, check if I have cancer in my chest. Do blood tests too, and I want a DNA test with you. If you manipulate those results, I really won’t stay quiet. I’ll watch every step of the process with my own eyes.”
“Whatever it takes to end this madness. I’ll be watching to see how you clean up this insanity afterward.”
The man spoke in a cold voice, and I silently looked down at my corpse lying before me.
∞ ∞ ∞
“How are you feeling today?”
“Still like shit.”
“…The weather seems to have warmed up a bit; it’s not that cold today. How about taking a walk? It’s not good to stay in the hospital room all the time.”
“Have you seen the people standing outside? They follow me wherever I go—how can I go anywhere with such surveillance?”
I laughed weakly, and the doctor looked even more pitiful as he sympathized with me. From his perspective, I probably looked genuinely insane.
Through various tests, I confirmed that my body now was Cha Sukyung’s body.
There was no trace of the cancer that had blackened my chest, I confirmed that the man I met on the first day was my body’s biological parent, and I learned that my blood type was A, not B as I had known.
Unless all of this was achieved through perfect manipulation, I had to accept that my body was now Cha Sukyung’s body. Of course, I had to go through a process of acceptance that was harder than dying.
At one point, I wondered if I really was crazy. As the doctor suggested, the theory that I was originally Cha Sukyung who decided to commit suicide due to psychological pressure, and after that failed, went through a stage of denying reality and created a different personality—as absurd as it sounded, it seemed more realistic than claiming I was really Min Jaehee.
Then how could I explain Min Jaehee’s life that I remembered? Memories from the orphanage, being sent to an organization to beg and pickpocket, the terrible pain from cancer, the desperate frustration I felt in that situation. It was too vivid and detailed to dismiss as imagination.
The life of Min Jaehee that I remembered was not a lie, the current situation was not a dream, and me occupying Cha Sukyung’s body was reality.
It couldn’t be explained scientifically, and I couldn’t seek understanding from anyone else, but this was the situation I was in now. Min Jaehee’s soul had entered Cha Sukyung’s body. That was the best explanation I could accept.
“Let’s continue the conversation we had yesterday. Do you have any memories of being Cha Sukyung?”
Here I had to make a choice. Claiming to be Min Jaehee and returning to Min Jaehee’s life, albeit in Cha Sukyung’s body. Or just living Cha Sukyung’s life with Cha Sukyung’s body.
What would I lose? The cancer that would lead me to death had disappeared, and I no longer needed to wander the streets stealing wallets to survive. Unlike Min Jaehee, who had no family or money, Cha Sukyung had a family and parents with a solid financial foundation, meaning he didn’t have to worry about making a living.
Cha Sukyung is dead anyway. I don’t know if Cha Sukyung’s soul is wandering somewhere, but right now, it’s Min Jaehee’s soul inside this body. Unless we find a shaman to locate Cha Sukyung’s soul or somehow extract Cha Sukyung’s soul from my dead body and swap them back, there’s no other option but for me to live as Cha Sukyung.
I don’t know if there’s any reason why I ended up in this situation, but ultimately, I became Cha Sukyung. And from now on, I had to live as Cha Sukyung.
“Nothing. I don’t… remember anything.”
“Good. Acknowledging your current state is the most important first step. We’ve taken a very important first step. That’s excellent.”
I brushed off the doctor’s meaningless praise with a casual smile. Maybe because Cha Sukyung’s father was the hospital director, despite all the harsh words and curses I had thrown, the doctor had been very respectful from our first meeting until now.
“How are your emotions now? Do you feel angry or enraged?”
“No, I’m very calm. I’ve been taking out my frustrations on you excessively, and I’m sorry about that. Now I just… feel good.”
In truth, I wasn’t in a particularly good state, but I wasn’t filled with resentment or unbearably frustrated like I was a few days ago. As the doctor said, I had gone through the stage of accepting my current state, and though others might not understand, I was very rationally accepting this situation myself.
“Do you feel like you want to escape the current situation or make any extreme choices?”
“I still feel confused, but I don’t have such extreme thoughts.”
The doctor seems to still be worried that I might have suicidal impulses. Despite the fact that I’m feeling more motivated to live than ever before.
Looking at it differently, I realized this was my last chance to live like a human being. So how could I not desperately want to live?
“I don’t think I’ll feel such impulses anymore. Your counseling seems to have helped a lot.”
“Good, very good. With this mindset, I guarantee your condition will improve sufficiently. Your guardian will be pleased too. Then from tomorrow, let’s arrange a meeting with your guardian. Since your memory is currently unstable, you’ll need a process of getting to know yourself before returning to daily life, right?”
“Yes, that seems… very necessary.”
I can’t just be Min Jaehee with nothing to his name. To live as Cha Sukyung, I needed a lot of information. Cha Sukyung’s family, Cha Sukyung’s daily life, Cha Sukyung’s situation. I needed to know all of that and make it my own.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
