“You can’t come in here.”
That’s what the man who stood behind the parking lot door said to Sook when she opened it.
The man looked utterly nondescript. A nondescript build. A nondescript dark suit. A voice and manner of speaking that was all very nondescript. The kind of person she would’ve immediately forgotten if she’d passed him on the street. But she hadn’t passed him on the street, she’d been stopped by him at the Institute’s basement-level parking lot.
“It’s not that he had no characteristics whatsoever. You could say his being exceedingly nondescript was a characteristic.”
Sook said this much later on. She also mentioned that the overhead lights in the parking lot happened to hit the man’s ID tag at just the right angle, so the glare obscured the text. Was that a characteristic?
Sook did not, at the time, think too deeply about the nondescript nature of the man. That’s just the nature of the nondescript, you see.
Instead, she asked him, “Why can’t I come in? Is something going on?”
Sook had been working at the Institute for some time now. She always came down the stairs to the underground parking lot after the evening’s work and took her car home. The parking lot exit was a little creepy to begin with, but this was the first time someone had actively stopped her from going on her way. It unsettled her and made her nervous.
“You have to go up a floor,” said the mysterious man in an even tone, not answering Sook’s question.
“But I need to get to my car.”
Sook had assumed the man, who was obviously some employee or other, hadn’t realized she drove to work. He must’ve thought she’d meant to leave by the ground-floor entrance of the Institute building. But that exit led to the empty fields that surrounded the center, and there was no public transportation nearby. Sook hardly lived within walking distance from work; there was no way she could go home without her car, which was currently parked in the basement level.
“You have to go up a floor,” the man repeated. Sook took a moment to think about it and decided to give up, as the man clearly was not concerned with giving her an explanation. No one bothered to explain things to “the cleaning lady.” Sook knew this all too well from years of experience, not just as a “cleaning lady” but as a “lady” in general. She let go of the doorknob and went back up the stairs. Her plan was to go up a floor, walk to the other end of the building, and take the elevator down the other side.
As she made her way up, the parking lot door she had left open behind her closed on its own. She was on the second step when it slammed shut, and the sound echoed through the stairwell and sent an involuntary shiver down her spine. Sook quickly made her way up the stairs and opened the door to the lobby.
Instead, she came out into the parking lot.
Her hand still on the doorknob, she stared disbelievingly around her. Here was her car, the old white hunk of junk she had come to work in that morning.
But the research center building only had one basement level. She turned around. Behind her was the same stairwell she had walked up and down for the past nine years. Her movement retriggered the light sensors and they blinked on. Sook stared hard behind her into the stairwell.
There were no stairs going down.
The man looked utterly nondescript. A nondescript build. A nondescript dark suit.
This was the story a sunbae at the center told me when I asked her if she had heard anything strange from the people on the night watch shift. I had just started to work at the Institute, and she was in charge of showing me the ropes, mostly because her shift ended as mine started. I would come up to the employees’ lounge and find her there, sitting in front of a steaming mug of tea, always in the same seat at the big table.
“Sook unni had worked here the longest,” my sunbae said. “She told me that story herself right after she quit.”
“She quit because of that?”
“No. She quit because of her kids.”
A very ordinary reason. Sook had raised three children alone. Her third child had had some kind of medical condition since birth. The life insurance payout after her husband’s car accident had been depleted fairly rapidly, with all the third child’s hospital fees, examinations, and medicine, as well as the added inconvenience of the four surviving family members requiring constant nourishment and a roof over their heads. Sook had to work at a restaurant by day and took on watch duties at the Institute by night. She managed to send her first and second child to good universities and to save enough money for her third child’s operation. Sook quit the Institute when she moved to a city that had those good universities and hospital.
“She said her life’s dream was to sleep under the same roof with her kids every night,” said my sunbae.
“Good for her,” I said. This Sook was not someone I knew personally, but it moved me to think of a parent who had raised three children alone finally achieving her life’s dream.
“I’m sure that unni had other things happen to her that she didn’t tell me about,” said my sunbae. “Because I saw that flashy thing myself.”
“You saw something?” I said, but I immediately regretted my faux pas. “I’m sorry.”
My sunbae grinned. “Believe me, I was also very surprised that I did. I didn’t know what it meant to actually see something until that moment.”
What my sunbae had seen was a whitish blur. A blur that would grow more intense or fainter and larger and smaller and then disappear.
“I saw it going up the stairs.”
“So what did you do?” I was hanging onto her every word.
“I just turned around and went back down.” She might as well have shrugged. “What else could I do?”
I was a little disappointed. But my sunbae became serious.
“You can’t react when that happens to you. Don’t try to touch it or anything. Never say things like, ‘Is anyone there?’ The moment you acknowledge its existence, it’ll come into creation right inside your mind and grow. You’ll be drawn in, then consumed.”
“How do you know that?” I exclaimed. “Do you have a special third eye because you’re blind, or something?”
My sunbae grinned again. I was mortified and wanted to sink into the floor, right through to the Institute’s “nonexistent” second basement. “I’m so sorry, that’s not—”
“I think I can work at the Institute precisely because I can’t see,” she mused. “Some sighted people don’t last for more than three days here. They make up stuff that doesn’t exist, they see things and hear things. And those things become real and haunt them. When they never existed in the first place.”
My sunbae went back to her story about the “flashy” thing. She was going up the steps when that large blob appeared before her. Having been blind since birth, my sunbae had never seen an object, any object, in her life. She couldn’t immediately comprehend that she was seeing for the first time. It was surprising, but not painful or dreadful at first, which was why she took a moment to consider it before dismissing it for the time being. She could always think more about this experience when she got back to her room to sleep.
This is an extract from The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (Scribe), available now at your local independent bookseller.
