By Zephyria 
While the man in the hospital staff uniform scrambled to make a call, I stood still, listening to the man, unable to hide my bewilderment at a few facts I had deduced.
First, the man I thought was the guy’s older brother might actually be another parent. Second, both of the guy’s parents were men. Third, that meant this man was the one who gave birth to him. And finally, the biggest shock was the word ‘corpse.’
I thought the guy was alive and hiding somewhere. We fell off the bridge together, and even though I had been hit by an oncoming car during the fall, I was perfectly fine. Therefore, I hadn’t expected for a second that he would have died. But a corpse?
“Please come in.”
The staff member, having finished the arrangements, led us to a large iron door. As we entered the open door, the air became even colder than before. I recognized at a glance that this was the morgue.
The staff member opened one of the doors of the large, locker-like refrigerators and pulled out what was inside. A flat metal table, something lying on top of it, and a white cloth covering that something. Even without being told, I knew it was a body.
“Pull it back. Then you’ll realize how absurd and insane your claims are.”
The man pointed to the white cloth covering the body, and as if drawn in, I approached and grabbed the edge of the cloth. For some reason, my fingertips trembled.
As the cloth was slowly pulled down, skin that had turned blue became visible. Legs, abdomen, arms, and chest, all ragged with injuries. And as the white cloth fell to the floor, the hidden face appeared.
It was a mangled, broken, and ruined corpse, but it wasn’t hard to recognize the face. It was the face I had seen every day in the mirror for twenty years of my life. I couldn’t hide my shock as I stood before my own corpse.
I was standing right here, yet it was hard to accept the corpse lying before me. My legs wobbled, and I had to grab the table where the body lay.
“Why… why am I here? What is this? What is this! I’m right here, so why is my corpse… did he die and change faces with me?”
“Please! For the love of god, can you stop that insane talk!”
“Then what is this! Why am I here…!”
This makes no sense. I am clearly alive, yet my corpse is here… it makes no sense. Did he die and swap faces with me? …Then what do they gain? What on earth do they gain by going this far? What is this nonsensical situation?
“This person died instantly at the scene. You fell onto the lane, and it seems this person was hit by an oncoming car. Fortunately—or looking at your current state, I don’t know if it’s fortunate—unlike this person, you didn’t have any major injuries. That is why this person is lying here as a corpse and you are standing here perfectly fine. So why don’t you stop this madness of claiming you are this person?”
“…”
“What? You’re not plotting some other nonsense to spout, are you? Why don’t you end the family disgrace here. I can’t even imagine how far you’ll go.”
Despite the man’s scathing remarks, no words came to me. I was here, yet I was seeing my own corpse with my own eyes; I was at a loss as to how to explain this situation.
The hand gripping the table trembled violently. A surge of nausea rose up my throat. Unable to hold it back, I vomited right onto the floor, and the man watching this clicked his tongue.
“In my chest… there’s cancer. I don’t have much time left to live. Do you know that?”
“What are you talking about now? You don’t have any such disease.”
“No, I’m going to die soon. I don’t know what this situation is or what you want from me… but I’m terminally ill and don’t know when I’ll die.”
The man let out a long sigh and replied, “Fine.”
“If you want, let’s take a picture of your chest. If you’ll stop that nonsense, I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“It’s not nonsense! I am…”
I really am not Cha Soo-kyung. I am Min Jae-hee. But those claims were choked back in my throat.
The doctor beside me lightly wrapped an arm around my slumped shoulder and patted it. At the warmth of a strange stranger, tears suddenly welled up for some reason.
“I… so, what is my relationship to you?”
“Now you’re going to claim multiple personalities and amnesia too?”
“Please! Just answer what I’m asking. What is your relationship to me? What are you and Cha Soo-kyung…”
“The person who gave birth to you. Your father. You seem unwilling to accept it, but I feel the same, so let’s just move past that.”
“Ha…”
Could there be a more ridiculous farce than this? With my own corpse before my eyes, wearing Cha Soo-kyung’s face, I stared blankly at the man who was Cha Soo-kyung’s father.
“Check… my chest. Whether it’s a CT or an MRI, check if there’s cancer in my chest. Do a blood test, and I want a DNA test with you. If you manipulate those results too, I really won’t stay quiet. I’ll verify every single step with my own eyes.”
“If that ends your madness, then anything. I’ll see how to clean up this mess after that.”
The man spoke in a cold voice, and I looked down silently at my own corpse lying before me.
∞ ∞ ∞
“How are you feeling today?”
“Today is also fucking shit.”
“…The weather seems to have warmed up a bit; it wasn’t that cold today. Why don’t you take a walk? It’s not good to stay in the hospital room too much.”
“Did you see the people standing outside? They follow me wherever I go. Where would I go with that kind of surveillance trailing me?”
I gave a powerless smile, and the doctor looked at me with an even more pitiful expression of sympathy. From his perspective, I probably looked like a complete lunatic.
Through various tests, I confirmed that my current body was that of Cha Soo-kyung.
There was no trace of the cancer that had once stained my chest black. I confirmed that the man I saw on the first day was my biological parent, and I learned that my blood type was A, not the type B I had known.
Unless all of this had been achieved through perfect fabrication, I had to accept that my body was now Cha Soo-kyung’s. Of course, it was a process of acceptance more difficult than dying.
At one point, I truly wondered if I had gone mad. As the doctor suggested, the absurd hypothesis—that I was originally Cha Soo-kyung, but due to some psychological pressure, I decided to commit suicide, and upon failing, I went through a stage of denying reality and created another personality—seemed more realistic than the claim that I was actually Min Jae-hee.
Then how could I explain the life of Min Jae-hee that I remembered? The memories of the orphanage, the life of begging and pickpocketing after being sent to a gang, the terrible pain caused by cancer, and the desperate frustration I felt in that situation. They were all too vivid and detailed to be dismissed as mere imagination.
The life of Min Jae-hee I remembered was not a lie, the current situation was not a dream, and the fact that I occupied Cha Soo-kyung’s body was reality.
It couldn’t be explained scientifically, and I couldn’t seek understanding from anyone else, but that was the situation I was in. Min Jae-hee’s soul had entered Cha Soo-kyung’s body. That was the best I could accept.
“Let’s continue the conversation from yesterday. Do you have any memories of Cha Soo-kyung at all?”
I had to make a choice here. Either claim I was Min Jae-hee and try to return to Min Jae-hee’s life despite being in Cha Soo-kyung’s body, or simply live Cha Soo-kyung’s life in Cha Soo-kyung’s body.
Was there anything I stood to lose? The cancer that led me to death was gone, and I no longer needed to wander the streets stealing other people’s wallets to make a living. Unlike Min Jae-hee, who had neither family nor money, Cha Soo-kyung had a family and a sturdy wallet—no, parents—who ensured he wouldn’t have to worry about his livelihood.
Cha Soo-kyung is dead anyway. I don’t know if Cha Soo-kyung’s soul is wandering somewhere, but right now, it’s Min Jae-hee who is in this body. Since I can’t go to a shaman to find Cha Soo-kyung’s soul, nor can I pull Cha Soo-kyung’s soul out of my dead body to swap back, isn’t the only way for me to live as Cha Soo-kyung?
I didn’t know if there was a reason why I ended up in this situation, but in the end, I became Cha Soo-kyung. And from now on, I had to live as Cha Soo-kyung.
“No. Nothing. …I don’t remember anything.”
“Good. It’s important to first acknowledge your current state. We’ve taken a very important first step. Very well done.”
I brushed off the doctor’s meaningless praise with a vague smile. I didn’t know if it was because Cha Soo-kyung’s father was the hospital director, but the doctor had been very polite from our first meeting until now, despite all the foul language and curses I had hurled at him.
“How are your emotions now? Don’t you feel a sudden surge of anger or rage?”
“No, I’m very calm. I know I took out too much of my anger on you, and I feel sorry about that. Right now, I just… feel good.”
Actually, I wasn’t in a particularly great state, but I didn’t feel the surge of resentment or the suffocating frustration I had felt a few days ago. As the doctor said, I had gone through the stage of accepting my current state, and while others might not, I personally accepted the situation quite rationally.
“Do you have any desire to escape your current situation, or any thoughts of making an extreme choice?”
“I’m still confused, but I don’t have any such extreme thoughts.”
The doctor still seemed worried that I might feel suicidal impulses, even though I felt a stronger will to live than ever before.
When I changed my perspective, I realized this was my last chance to live like a human being. So, wouldn’t I be desperate to live?
“I don’t think I’ll feel those impulses anymore. I think the consultations with you have been very helpful.”
“Good, very good. With this mindset, I guarantee the patient’s condition will improve sufficiently. Your guardian will be pleased as well. Then, starting tomorrow, let’s arrange a meeting with your guardian. Since your memories are currently unstable, you’ll need a process of getting to know yourself before returning to daily life, right?”
“Yes, …I think that will be very necessary.”
I couldn’t just be a reckless, wild Min Jae-hee. To live as Cha Soo-kyung, I needed a lot of information. Cha Soo-kyung’s family, Cha Soo-kyung’s daily routine, Cha Soo-kyung’s circumstances. I needed to know all of it and make it my own.