Blood splatters. It’s Granny’s blood. Everything turns red before my eyes. Had Granny been in pain? As I was now? Had she, nevertheless, been relieved that she was the one in pain, and not me?
Plop. A teardrop fell on my face. It was hot. So hot that it burned. Just then, something inside my heart exploded. Strange feelings flooded in. No, they didn’t flood in, they flooded out. A dam that had existed somewhere inside my body burst. A sudden surge. Something inside me broke free, forever.
“I feel it,” I whispered. Whether it was grief, happiness, loneliness, pain, fear, or joy, I did not know. I just knew I felt something. A wave of nausea hit me. I wanted to throw up the disgust that was surging into me. Yet, I thought it was a wonderful experience. Suddenly, an unbearable drowsiness overcame me. My eyes were heavy. The face of Gon, all wet with tears, vanished from sight.
At last, I became a human. And at that very moment, the world was drifting far away from me.
In fact, this is the end of my story.
74
So, what follows is a sort of postscript to my story.
My soul slipped out of my body and looked down at Gon, holding me in his arms, crying. The hairless patch on his head was shaped like a star. I realized, I had not once laughed at it. Hahaha. I laughed out loud. That’s the last thing I remember.
When I came to, I was back in reality. Meaning, I was at the hospital. I dozed on and off for hours. It took several months for me to fully recover and start walking again.
In my sleep, I had the same recurring dream. In it, it’s sports day in the schoolyard. Gon and I stand in the sun among clouds of dust. It is blazing hot. A track-and-field event is taking place in front of us. Gon grins and slides something into my hand. I spread out my fingers to find a translucent marble rolling in my palm. A red curved line through the middle looks like a smile. As I roll the marble around in my hand, the red line keeps flipping, making a sad face and a smiley face by turns. It’s plum-flavored candy.
I put it in my mouth. It is sweet and sour. My mouth waters. I roll the candy around with my tongue. Sometimes it knocks against my teeth, making click click sounds. All of a sudden, my tongue prickles. Salty and sharp, pungent or bitter. Amid it all wafts up the sweetest scent that keeps me sniffing hungrily.
Bang! The sound of the starting pistol shakes the air. We push off the ground and break into a run. It is not a race, it’s just running. All we need to do is simply feel our bodies splitting the air.
*
I woke up to find Dr. Shim next to me. He told me what had happened.
That day, right after I passed out, Professor Yun rushed to the scene with the police. It would’ve been a lot cooler if we had solved everything by ourselves, but to grown-ups, I guess we were still just kids. Dora had called our homeroom teacher and some kids had explained Gon’s relationship with Steamed Bun to the police, who then sought out Steamed Bun. It was not too difficult to track Steel Wire from there.
Steel Wire was stabbed by Gon. But he was not severely injured and recovered faster than I did and was awaiting trial.
The things Steel Wire had done were beyond imaginable and it’s hard to list everything here. I heard later that he smiled throughout his trial, even when he was receiving a very heavy sentence. How on earth was his mind—no, the human mind—constructed? I hoped that someday in his life he’d be given a chance to be able to wear a different expression on his face.
Dr. Shim said Gon’s stabbing of Steel Wire would be considered self-defense, and that Gon was receiving therapy but wasn’t ready to see me yet. Professor Yun took a leave of absence from his college to change his life and live solely for Gon. Gon still didn’t talk to him much. But Professor Yun said he would never give up trying.
Dr. Shim said Dora had stopped by several times, and gave me a card she had left. I opened it to find a photo instead of any writing; that was like her, she hated letters. Dora was running in the picture. Both her legs up in midair, she looked like she was flying. She had transferred to a school that had a track-and-field team, and as soon as she did, she’d won second place in her district. I supposed she had found her dream again, the one she’d said had evaporated. Dorai, her parents must’ve still called her, but with a smile.
“You have more colorful expressions now,” Dr. Shim told me. I shared with him the wonderful thing that had happened on that terrible night. The strange changes that my body and mind had suddenly undergone.
“Let’s take an MRI when you’re fully recovered,” Dr. Shim said. “And redo all your clinical tests too. It’s time to check how much your brain has changed. To be honest, I have always doubted your diagnosis. I was a doctor myself once, but doctors like to put labels on patients. It helps them treat abnormal symptoms, or even abnormal people. Of course, labels can often be clear and useful. But the human brain is rather a strange thing. And I still truly believe that the heart can prevail over the brain. What I’m trying to say is that you might have just grown in a way that’s a little different from how other people grow.” He smiled.