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  • Pauline Brochain-Destais

Fate is a losing game

Dernière mise à jour : 29 avr. 2021

This is a story in which you are the hero. Let yourself be carried away, and have a good trip.


 

Busan, 19th October 2018

This is a story in which you are the hero. Let yourself be carried away, and have a good trip.

Here is the context of your adventure. You are a 17-year-old Korean girl. Your name is Kim Soo-Ah and you live in Busan, South Korea. You have a girlfriend who lives in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. You probably think you are just another high school student, don't you? Uhm, bad pick. You somehow inherited a unique ability. You are able to see the future. But let's not exaggerate either, you are not able to activate it on command - it would be too simple. Let's just say that you have flashes, a few images that appear to you. You must think of yourself as a pretty cool person. Come on, let's flatter your ego, yes you are cool. Unfortunately, you only look cool to yourself since no one knows about your forshadowing abilities. Oh, come on, don't make that face, you're amazing anyway!

All right, now that you know who you are, the adventure can begin.

You're in high school, it's 8:30 in the morning, yes, it's early, you meet your best friend, Park Jae-Hyun, and criticize his wrinkled uniform like every morning. You are walking with slow steps towards your English class. You wince at the hell that awaits you, then finally you enter.

At 10:30 am, you stretch out your stiff legs and watch with distracted eyes as the boys climb on top of each other (don't think about it, just keep reading). It's been a while since you've had any visions. It's often a harbinger of bad news. Wanting to go to English class as to hang yourself, you finally decide to skip class. You walk to Jae-Hyun and ask him to cover you.

"You'll owe me ramen," he replies, looking up to the sky.

You slip away with a smile.

When you get home, you take off your shoes and throw yourself on your bed. You close the shutters and lie down to finally have some semblance of rest.

You sleep quietly, when suddenly you have convulsions. Your eyes open suddenly and a slightly blurred image appears in front of you. Yes, dear reader, here at last are the famous visions you have been waiting for so long. The images scroll quickly in front of your eyes but you are used to them and are able to memorize them. The images are not clear and not even in the right direction. This means that your visions cover a lot of years. You see Busan as if it were accelerated. The days pass in a quarter of a second. You see the air of Busan becoming more and more polluted (so far, as sad as it is, nothing abnormal) but above all, suddenly, the streets of Busan are empty.

Only a few passers-by, masks on their noses, come out of their houses. But above all you see many many ambulances. The years continue to pass before your squared eyes. 2025, thousands of people suddenly leave their homes and head for the city borders. Panic slowly creeps into you. Are they running away? Probably. But what are they escaping? Monsters? The government? Has North Korea finally attacked us?

All of a sudden, a good quarter of the runaways collapse, convulsing on the sidewalk, while their compatriots continue to run with no concern for them.

By 2028, there was no one left in the city. Only the bodies of the victims of this enemy that you cannot identify. You can almost smell the stench of the streets, the putrefaction of the bodies. All these sensations that you never thought you'd be confronted with at such a young age. The air gets stuck in your throat, which you grab with both hands in the hope that a breath of oxygen will reach your empty lungs. You close your eyes, and, as expected, it all stops. The images disappear, and the only thing you can see is darkness. The feeling of the air filling your lungs is delightful, and you feel it as if it is the first time you have breathed.

After long minutes of rest, you may gently open one eye and then the other. In the dark, you can see the reassuring outline of your furniture. You are sweating in your bed. You lie down to contemplate your ceiling for what seems like hours. Finally, you decide to get up and go make yourself a coffee.

With shaky hands, you turn on the coffee maker thinking about what you just saw.

"Let's summarize," you say to yourself. You grab a piece of paper and a pencil and jot down some initial ideas. An invisible enemy has forced the people of Busan to flee, and has decimated some of them. The last image you got was worthy of a dystopian novel. A faded city, emptied of all human life, corpses lying in the boulevards and avenues, signs of restaurants (specializing in kimchi, moreover) black with dust.

A chaotic landscape, as seen in disaster movies at the cinema.

Then suddenly, a detail comes back to you. Masks, ambulances. The link seems obvious: it's a disease. Yet South Korea is fourth in the world ranking of the health system. A simple disease would not have decimated a quarter of the population of a large city like Busan. Dozens of questions are swirling around in your head. How many people will die? Will this disease spread throughout Korea? Or even to the whole world? And above all... Is there any way to avoid it...?

You rub your eyes for a long time and decide to take a shower to relax.

Once dressed, you go out into the street and let your steps guide you. Surprisingly, you find yourself in front of a pharmacy. You then enter and buy a packet of masks, as a precaution. You get out and you mechanically go to the Busan shopping mall, where you stop to buy kimchi (for the uncultured, the kimchi 김치 is a traditional Korean dish based on vegetables fermented in brine, and it's delicious). You sit on the docks of Nakdong River, and eat your kimchi, lost in your thoughts. What should you do?

You take your phone out of your pocket and open your conversation with your girlfriend (Park Na-Bom).

Is telling her a good idea? How will she take it?

Doubt creeps in and you put away your phone. You throw your cardboard bowl in a recycling garbage can and take out your earphones. You listen distractedly to your favourite song and think about one thing: you've stopped your vision, but as soon as you go to bed, it will continue. Because that's how it works. Every vision is a set of images that you have to see, no matter what happens, and fate always finds a way to send you the rest of the story when you interrupt it. That's how it works.

You feel your phone vibrate and take it out of your pocket. A message from Na-Bom. No, a message from his mother, who writes from Na-Bom's phone.

"Soo-Ah, this is Park Hee-Won writing. Na-Bom is sick. She's in the hospital. The virus is not identified yet, but she has been feeling tired since we returned from China. She's on oxygen and we're not sure if she's going to make it. You should come to Seoul. The doctors say she may not make it through the night. You'll have to wear a hospital mask, they say it's contagious.

Park Hee-Won.

Your hands are shaking and your teeth are chattering. Your phone falls as if in slow motion and the screen breaks on contact with the paving stones on the dock.

7h30pm. You are at the Sahmyook Medical Center, and you are wandering the halls looking for room 511. You hate hospitals. Everything there is immaculate white, oppressing, far too white for a place that welcomes death. You reflected on the train to Seoul, and made the connection between the Na-Bom virus and the one in your visions. Your belly tightened as you imagined the body of the woman you love decomposing in the streets of the capital. But something was bothering you: you are in 2018, but the apocalypse is not due to begin until 2019. Would your visions be wrong? Impossible. Was it you who misread or misinterpreted? Unlikely, but not impossible. Panic was eating away at you. You arrived in front of room 511. You knock. No answer. You enter. The smell then takes you by the throat, in spite of the mask. Na-Bom lies on the floor, eyes open, tongue hanging out. Tetanized, you utter a cry. The room starts to sway and then everything turns black.

June 26th, 2022

You are on the roof of a building, the one in which your father works daily. You are now 21 years old. The distant sound of an ambulance reaches your ears, a tear rolls down your cheek.

You put the long farewell letter on the ground, take off your shoes and put them on top so that it doesn't fly away.

You walk to the edge and step over the barrier. You turn your back to the void and stare at the night sky for a moment. Then you whisper for yourself

"Sorry Na-Bom, I knew, I knew and I did nothing. I'm on my way."

Your hands come away from the barrier and you close your eyes and breathe calmly.

And with a smile you leave Korea.

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