The most desperate-looking person at the table spoke directly to Yona.
‘Next Monday, we’re going to hold a protest in the lobby,’ he said. ‘All the victims will be on strike, so it won’t seem like we have anything to hide. We’re not the people who need to be ashamed—it’s that bastard Jo-gwang Kim, isn’t it? Manager Ko, join us, please.’
‘I’m sorry, there’s been a misunderstanding,’ Yona replied nervously. ‘Something unsavoury did happen to me, but I don’t know if I’d call it sexual harassment. I think I misunderstood Mr Kim’s intentions.’
Everyone looked surprised by Yona’s statement. The desperate man spoke again.
‘Team leader, we all saw it.’
This time, it was Yona who was surprised.
‘There are multiple CCTVs in the office,’ he said. ‘You may not realise it, but for all you know, everyone in the building knows what happened to you. If you try to hide something like this, something that everyone’s talking about, our situation only becomes more awkward.’
Yona grew uncomfortable hearing the man say ‘our situation’. She tried to think of a prior engagement as an excuse to escape.
‘We know you’re embarrassed,’ he continued. ‘But that’s even more of a reason for us to pool our strength. We’ll get in touch. You need time to think.’
Yona hurriedly replied, ‘All right,’ and stood up from her chair. She pushed open the door to their private dining room and walked out into the hallway, but she couldn’t find her shoes. The restaurant consisted of private booths lined up against a central corridor, and customers had to remove their footwear before entering the rooms. It seemed that another customer had left wearing Yona’s shoes.
‘This is why you should have put your shoes on the rack,’ the owner of the restaurant grumbled to Yona. ‘Our customers are always losing their possessions, especially recently. What will you do without your shoes?’
The owner made more of a fuss than necessary looking for the missing sneakers and opened the door to the room full of Kim’s victims. One of the people inside offered to go out and buy Yona a pair of shoes to wear to her next destination, but Yona just wanted to get as far away as possible from everyone in there. She forcefully declined and decided to borrow a pair of rough slippers from the restaurant for the time being.
The shoes she had lost were actually part of a pair and a half. The store she’d bought them from offered a second right shoe for free with the purchase of each pair. If only the first two of her three shoes hadn’t been stolen at the restaurant, the remaining survivor wouldn’t have taunted her from the hallway of her apartment when she got home. But the leftover single shoe reminded her of the group of victims and of Kim, and it made her anxious.
Yona received several emails and phone calls after the meal, but she didn’t answer them. She would rather not accept the fact that she’d been sexually harassed. Neither did she want to stand unashamed in the lobby and attack Kim. More specifically, she had no desire to join the group of victims, the has-beens and the losers, the dregs of the company. She thought again of what they had told her about the CCTV, that everyone already knew what had happened to her.
On the day of the protest, Yona ran into them in the lobby, holding a large banner. They didn’t cover their faces, but Yona unwittingly hid hers as she passed by them. The protesters were disciplined within a few days. That night, Yona threw out her third shoe.
‘Please, just take it,’ Yona’s co-worker said, handing her the customer service call. The man on the phone kept asking, ‘Why can’t I?’ over and over again. Why can’t I cancel the trip? was what he meant. ‘Why can’t you hang up?’ Yona wanted to say in response. As she listened to the man speak, she forgot her prepared script for dealing with customers. The person with whom this man was planning to travel had died.
‘Is it a direct relative?’ Yona asked. ‘The person you were going to travel with.’
‘No, she’s not,’ he answered.
‘Let me check our policy and I’ll call you back.’
Yona unnecessarily asked for the man’s phone number a second time and hung up. She didn’t want to, but she had told him that she would check on his case. The cancellation of this trip depended entirely upon Yona. If she decided to, she could cancel without a fee, although of course Jungle officially discouraged doing such a thing. But how could someone go on holiday after his travel partner had died? Yona decided that she would cancel the trip for the man. But that afternoon, a brochure for the Jinhae trip landed on Yona’s desk. Its acknowledgements page bore the name of a co-worker from another team. Yona was filled with such feverish anger that she couldn’t sit inside the office any longer. She left work early, before she could file a cancellation request.
Yona usually took three different subway lines on her way home, even though she could get home by taking only two. Over the past few years, the possible routes between Jungle’s office and her apartment had increased. Stations dotted the city with greater density, new lines had emerged and existing lines had expanded to neighbouring towns. It varied a bit depending on which route she took, but travel time between Yona’s apartment and work kept decreasing. This surprised Yona, because now there were more stations than ever. In spite of her shortened commute, the typical journey home felt lengthier and even more boring than before. It was exhausting, too, that in spite of so many new lines, train cars were always packed during rush hour. The city was satiating its ravenous hunger by pulling more and more people into its belly. Yona’s phone rang. It was the customer who had called her that morning, already forgotten in the midst of Yona’s distress. Didn’t he say that his travel companion had died? She had told him she would cancel his trip, because of course he couldn’t go now. She was angry with the man for following her home by phone, but more than that, she resented Jungle for giving out her mobile phone number so people could call her after hours. Yona gave the man the following verdict:
‘Refunds are only possible in the case of death of the purchaser,’ Yona said as she was swept up into a large crowd. ‘This means that the person you planned to travel with can cancel for a refund, but if you cancel, you won’t get your money back.’ The man hung up. Yona looked at the subway map. Lines under construction suffocated the city with one new stop after another. Yona wanted to set the end of one of the subway lines on fire, like using a match to stop a run in a sweater. She wanted the threads to stop unravelling.
Summer began. It had been a while since flowers fell off the trees, and in their place black cherries were now plummeting to the ground, so that the pavements were covered with juicy bruises. Yona finally sent in her resignation letter.
‘Be honest,’ Kim said as he grabbed a drink for her from the coffee machine. ‘Do you need a break, or are you looking for another job?’
It was a fitting question.
‘I just need to rest for a bit,’ Yona said. ‘I haven’t been feeling well recently.’
Kim nodded. Who knew if Yona was repeating the words of so many employees before her?
‘Even so, I can’t really let you go, can I?’ Kim asked.