A fresh-faced teenager strained to push the shopping cart. In some ways it looked as if the cart were dragging her. She had zipped shut the backpack in the cart and had her earphones on. She would have resembled one of the homeless people living in the bus terminal if it weren’t for her age; she lacked the hard-boiled look of someone who had lived a long, difficult life. Though her arms were thin, her upper body was on the plump side, and her carelessly slipped-on sneakers dragged across the ground.
The Express Bus Terminal was a nightmare dreamed up by the massive city of Seoul: a place of hoarse-throated religious fanatics and male prostitutes selling themselves for small change, beggars missing both their legs singing hymns, con men targeting the simple-minded from the provinces, prostitutes without a regular beat, teenage runaways, a cult leader who believed in the coming of aliens, hucksters, and purse snatchers; all of them loathing one another. Behind the fake monk who begged while tapping at a wooden gong, a man traded in his kidney, and another man—whose early ejaculation problems made him unable to satisfy his hot-blooded wife—paid an unlicensed Asian medicine doctor for a white, powdery treatment with dubious powers. Doomsday believers, who trusted that on Judgment Day only the faithful would be saved, positioned themselves throughout the terminal. According to their prophet, October 28, 1992, would be Judgment Day. Back then, many of the prophets stank of overripe, rotting fruit. News of establishing diplomatic relations between longtime enemies, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Korea, came trickling in from the large TV installed in the waiting room. Thousands of buses came and went and hundreds of thousands of people swerved past one another.
Almost no one paid attention to the girl. A sole elderly drunk man leered at her, but as soon as she pushed her cart into the bathroom, he lost interest.
She went to a handicap stall and pushed the cart inside. After locking the door and grabbing her backpack, she sat on the toilet seat and withdrew a disposable adult diaper from the pack. She struggled out of her sweatsuit and put it in the cart. As soon as she released the mercilessly tightened maternity belt, her swollen belly sagged out. She pulled off the wet diaper she’d worn beneath her underwear and tossed it into the trashcan. A foul stench overwhelmed the stall. She wiped her sweaty forehead and checked her watch. She took some short, deep breaths and an occasional deliberate heave, but her breathing soon turned irregular. It was as if a skilled torturer occasionally left her alone then returned on impulse.
Used diapers piled up in the trashcan as hot fluid continued seeping from her. The floor became wet. The girl went limp as she watched the amniotic fluid soak her knees and ankles, then finally swirl down a drain clogged with hair. She screamed as pain swept over her again.
Before her echoing screams faded, someone opened the bathroom door and entered. The girl held her breath and stopped up her mouth with her fist. The person went into another stall and immediately flushed the toilet. A lighter was flicked, then smoke drifted over into the girl’s stall. Finally the person flushed the toilet again, slammed the stall door shut, and hurried out.
The pauses between contractions became shorter. The girl was seized by fear that the pain would last forever, and was surrendering to the savage monster ripping into her lower belly with thousands of sharp toenails, when a hot energy surged from the crown of her head to her feet. The pain disappeared as if it had never existed. As if it had swirled down some unstopped hole.
She just managed to stay propped up by resting on the toilet, gazing with glassy eyes down at the strange living being dangling from her body. The creature covered in blood and amniotic fluid kept quivering its mouth, but it wasn’t crying. The folds around its eyes twitched. The girl needed to finish before it got noisy. She had barely managed to bend and pick up the clammy thing when she wavered. She steeled herself and removed scissors from the backpack, disinfected them with a disposable lighter, and cut the umbilical cord. She threw the lighter into the trashcan but missed, so it rolled across the floor. When she lifted the baby, he started crying.
Like sewage during the rainy season surging upward and pushing past manhole covers, the cry eddied around the stall, filled the bathroom, spilled into the raucous terminal, and swept over the crowds. The girl clamped her hand over the baby’s mouth but it was useless. The people exposed to the melancholy scream shuddered. In a space where the only code of conduct toward strangers was indifference, a strange, sudden shame seized them. In the newborn baby’s cry was a spell that hit each individual’s guilty conscience, and it sent a strong warning: save him from eminent tragedy, or else. Everyone stampeded like a startled herd of cows in the direction of the cry.
Before the girl’s delicate, bloodstained hand could smother the baby’s last breath, before she could put to sleep that fierce will to live, they swarmed in. A man kicked the door open, and the flimsy hinge flew into the air. If it weren’t for the fierce cries, like an awl piercing their ears, the crowd would have assumed they were witnessing a brutal murder scene, since the floor was soaked with the girl’s bloody secretions and amniotic fluid. The crowd, agitated by the smell of blood, screamed like monkeys. The flurry of their arms and legs resembled the sudden incarnation of a Hindu god.
A police car and an ambulance arrived quickly. The paramedic tranquilized the girl lying on the stretcher, who soon passed out. Her mind was transported to the two-story house of her childhood, herself asleep in a crib. A dark thundercloud hovered over. Was it about to rain, she wondered, as she continued gazing up. When the ambulance arrived at the emergency room, nurses easily lifted her and moved her to a bed. The girl suddenly looked around. Where is the bloody creature I was just holding? She didn’t remember seeing it in the ambulance. What was it called, that squishy, clammy body that cried so loudly? A jumble of words stirred and moved restlessly in her foggy brain. Then a word swam to the surface.
“The baby, where is the baby?” she screamed, rising from the bed until a young intern pushed her back down.