“Those who escape hell, however, never talk about it
and nothing much bothers them after that.”

— Charles Bukowski, Lost

Six.
Lost Time

~ · ~ · ~

I meet Baekhyun again at the cafeteria. As expected, he arrives past noon and I’m already half-way through mine. I can’t get used to the wide variety of choices served every day so it’s really hard for me to tell if I’ve actually been improving my diet. Minseok, however, keeps telling me that I should get at least one dish from each table.

“This isn’t a hospital,” he would tell me. “No one’s stopping you from eating anything.”

So, I manage to get one dish from each table. There are six tables surrounding the area. There’s a vegetable and fruits section as well as a meat section. There’s also a separate table for carbohydrates and another for deserts. The other table is reserved just for drinks of different kinds — soda, cola, water, tea, coffee, milk, juice, milkshake, and even smoothies. Anything you ask for, they probably have it. None of the drinks are labeled and it’s almost as if you’ll forget that they probably are branded when they first come in the facility.

“Mind if I join you?” Baekhyun asks as he sits across me anyway. He’s not asking; he’s just making his presence known. And I know he’s been around the cafeteria grabbing just about anything he desires to eat that day. It’s hard not to notice him when he’s around greeting just about everyone he bumps into. If he knows them, he will call them by their names — participants and staff — and if he doesn’t, he greets them a jolly old good morning.

You see, Baekhyun doesn’t seem like an extrovert but he somehow feels the need to be nice to everyone he meets. I always wonder what his life is like outside these walls. How many people have taken advantage of him? How many people have realized he’s actually someone who’s carrying a great deal of pain too?

I don’t say a word. I don’t find it necessary to say anything after he’s already welcomed himself to the table. “So, how are you?” he asks me again, and this time, it seems like a legitimate question because he pauses for me to answer.

“Good,” I tell him. “You?” Reflexes.

“Great,” he says with a chuckle in his voice. It’s like he’s waiting for me to ask about his day but I don’t so he just eats silently across me.

To be quite honest, befriending anyone in this place is not a goal I’d like to achieve. I don’t plan on making connections through the course of 6 months that could potentially change my mind. I had my mind set on one thing when I came here and I look for no reason to change that. But it’s actually quite hard not to do that with a counselor meeting you every other day and a Baekhyun in the midst.

“I haven’t seen you since that day,” Baekhyun says. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s a huge place. I won’t be surprised if you’ve been out exploring it the past few days.”

I haven’t. Most of the time, I sit in my room because I find it difficult for me to step out of it. I just sit by my window and watch the people outside play. Sometimes I feel like playing but time runs out on me every single time. Before I know it, everyone’s gone and I’m watching nobody play anything.

“I’ve been playing tennis with a few people. We meet every four in the afternoon at the tennis court. Would you like to join us sometime?”

I shake my head. All that’s left in my tray are the empty dishes.

“Okay then,” he says. He doesn’t sound disappointed so he’s probably just asking me to be nice. That doesn’t disappoint me just as much.

“Kyungsoo,” Baekhyun says my name and it’s like he only remembered it now. “Kyungsoo, you’re a donor, right?”

I look up and he’s just staring at me, waiting for an answer.

I nod. “Why do you ask?”

“Nothing,” he says laughing down to his food. He has quite a lot on his tray. He has a bowl of udon, a cup of rice, a pork cutlet with sauce, and a small plate of salad. He’s drinking some fruit juice that’s already half empty. “I just wonder where you’ll be in a few months.”

“Non-existent, I hope.”

“Do you ever think about the person who you’ll give your remaining life to?”

I shake my head. It’s never occurred to me that it’s important who gets it. “Do you ever think of the person whose life you’ll take?”

He shakes his head. “Whenever I try to, it just gets harder for me to move on with this process so I try not to think about it too much.”

“But you have?”

“Oh, I did,” Baekhyun laughs. “I have no idea how much time I have left but I know that I’ve gotten my hopes up one too many times that I’ve stopped expecting there will be anyone at all.”

He’s still not touching his food and I am starting to wonder what cold Udon tastes like. “How did you become a donee?” I ask him, almost out of the blue and after a minute of silence. The cafeteria has lost its crowd and there are only a few people left including me and Baekhyun. The noise can’t cancel out my question or how it sounds if it does sound wrong at all.

But Baekhyun laughed for a moment a second after I asked. He laughs like he’s been relieved that I have the slightest interest toward him as a person.

“Well, I wasn’t planning to be, that’s for sure,” he starts, sitting up straight. “I came here with one reason, like each one of the donors who come here — to be non-existent but literally. I came here soaked in blood with a knife on one hand and the other on my neck. I thought a quick death is the best death. But it turns out, it’s not my time yet. I don’t remember coming to this place but I remember waking up here. When I did, it’s been two weeks since the incident.”

“After a bunch of therapy sessions over the course of 2 months, I was almost a free man. Then, during one of the monthly health check-ins, they found something in my lungs. Apparently, one of my own lungs is eating itself. That’s not a sight to see or pleasure to hear, I know. But they ask me anyway: do you want to leave or do you wish to stay?”

“And you stayed…”

“No, I asked them to let me leave. I thought it was some kind of punishment, you know? When you’ve done so many wrong things in your life, you’ll start to wonder when karma will get back at you. This was my karma, I thought. And they let me go.”

“But it didn’t take me two weeks to come back. I think only three days have passed, then I started coughing out blood. And I tell you, it doesn’t taste right. I stayed in the hospital for a day and saw death all around me. One by one, the people at the ward started dying like I’m the one who caused it. When I realized I was the only one left, I got up and went. I crawled back to this place and begged them to take me in. I wanted to live. Death was chasing me and this place was the only way for me to avoid it.”

“You don’t look sick,” I tell him and he nods.

“That’s because I am not. At least not as sick. After the lung transplant, they took me back in. There was a significant decrease in my life expectancy. It wasn’t a lot in the first place — 30 more years or so? But with every procedure I went through, my life expectancy lessened and lessened. Now, I don’t have much left.”

“I’m running out of time. Does that alarm me? Hell, yes. But that doesn’t make me lose hope. One of these days, they’ll call me in to tell me the great news. If that doesn’t happen then I guess, maybe, as Dr. Kim would tell me, it’s probably time.”

Perhaps, VITA is just like any other place. It’s hell for some people and heaven for some. It’s not as perfect but it sure has the answers to questions we all have. Will it be possible to live through this place? Or is this where we all meet our demise?