Like a Fish in a Tank

The whole morning filled up after the team leader left, appointments stacking one after another as if Engineer Team Na had all been sent on break. I hammered the confirm button on every last one. Three days in, and I was finally getting the hang of working here. The moment the confirmation messages went out, the Japanese staff came in on schedule, one after another, and I saw them through.

Five of them were nothing unusual—cavities, ceramic that had been treated once and since fallen off, tartar removal, periodontitis. The last patient was different. His name was Tamaki Yuzuru. Aside from lips split raw, as if he'd been chewing on them, he looked perfectly fine. Then he opened his mouth, and it was a complete wreck.

I had never seen stomatitis this bad. The sores crowded his tongue and packed the floor of his mouth so thickly that the sight alone made me wince. What do you even do to end up like that? Had a bomb gone off in there? When I asked him what had happened, he didn't answer.

"Did you chew up a sea urchin? A hedgehog, maybe?"

"......No."

Then the silence settled in. Ask him something and he either didn't answer or answered very slowly. I numbed him and burned the lesions out with the laser, one by one. The smell of searing flesh hung in the air, and by the time I'd cauterized every sore I knew I was going to run past the next appointment, so I messaged the following patient ahead of time to beg a little patience.

I had him gargle, then wrote out prescriptions for anti-inflammatories and a medicated rinse. After that I unloaded the lecture: stay off rough, hard, or raw food, and off anything salty or spicy; absolutely no alcohol, absolutely no cigarettes; sleep a solid eight hours or more. Tamaki, who had been listening in a daze, nodded slowly. I scooped up a handful of the vitamin candies I'd been keeping in my pocket and eating one at a time, and set them in his palm.

"There are vitamins in them, so have one when you're stressed. Can you take leave?"

"......No."

How did these people even request vacation? Mine was fixed to the weekends, but I had no idea how someone on a four-shift rotation was supposed to use theirs.

"The best thing would be not to work at all—rest properly, eat well, gargle, and sleep as much as you can. If you can't, then you can't. Ask your team leader whether a dentist's opinion is enough to get you time off, and if he says yes, come straight back. I'll tell him you absolutely need it. Two full days of rest."

He still said nothing, and when I added dental floss on top of everything else his arms were practically overflowing. See you in three days. Take care of yourself. I finished a visit in which the doctor had done nearly all the talking, and called the next patient in.

I was midway through treating a cavity for someone on Engineer Team A when a chat popped up on my pad. It was a Japanese staff member I'd already seen. Strangely, he wasn't asking about his own teeth. He wanted to know the state of Tamaki Yuzuru's. I wondered if it was Sato, the leader of Team Na, but the name was different.

While the patient rinsed, I sent my reply.

Nothing else came after that.

Four days here, and I still couldn't believe I was on the seafloor. I tried not to register that I was trapped, and yet every so often I felt it anyway. Strange.

A dentist who clocks in at morning and has patients pouring through until evening, with no break but lunch, works without a pause. In that sense it isn't so different from an ordinary office job or running your own shop. You stay planted in one place, and aside from lunch you rarely stray far from the spot assigned to you.

I had thought life on land and life in an undersea base wouldn't differ much. Down here, the difference was unmistakable. Even the air I breathed felt different. It was like seeing patients inside an airplane—like being a fish shut in a tank that had been artificially conditioned, just barely, so something human could live.

I counted it a mercy that I wasn't particularly social, or particularly active. People who can't stand sitting still at home would probably lose their minds after a single day in a place like this. Even I, an introvert, felt a fierce urge to go mad from wanting wind on my face and a lungful of fresh air. And it had only been four days.

Seeing a gap before the next appointment, I boarded the Central Elevator without hesitating. The moment I stepped off at Level 0, I wandered the artificial island with nowhere to go. The wind was ferocious. White blades on the turbines planted across the island spun madly in it. A few steps on, thinking that if I'd been even a little lighter the wind would have carried me off, a brutal sun came for my eyeballs.

Five minutes of sunlight, sea wind, and dust, and a longing welled up for the clinic—warm, quiet, and still empty. Cold. Too much wind. I want something sweet. I hurried back onto the Central Elevator, dropped into the sea again, and ran for the coffee shop in Jungang-dong, the Central Sector.

Red Coral, in the 4th Undersea Base, was a coffee shop run by a Japanese woman named Fumiko. For days now I'd been drinking two cups a day and working through most of what they had. The best was the Red Coral Coffee—a latte that, taken as a triple shot, sent the caffeine straight into the bloodstream. It really was delicious. Afterward my hands shook. I wanted something sweet, but with another patient waiting I ordered an orange blended and stood there for it.

There were plenty of chairs beside the café, and the people who had ordered were sitting, waiting, talking, or fighting with their mouths. A man and a woman seemed to have been at it since before I arrived. I'd been ready to step in if it turned to fists, or to call a Medic, but until my drink came they stayed peacefully seated, baring their teeth at each other and going at it in fast, aggressive speech.

I sat and swallowed the finely blended orange juice, pretending not to watch. Then I realized most of the people around the café were watching the pair the same way I was, felt oddly relieved, and headed back to the clinic, where a patient would already be on the way.

On the walk over, something occurred to me. If a problem came up down here, or a fight, how was it handled? The undersea base guidebook had mentioned something like an Undersea Relic Protection Convention. Surely there was an Undersea Base Staff Protection Convention as well? I still hadn't finished reading my own hiring papers. Looking at a shark's skull visible in the distance, I suddenly asked myself the question.

......Am I tired? I gripped the orange blended in both hands. Maybe it was only that I was new, but the simple fact of working in an undersea base still felt strange. Or maybe the work itself was just too different from life on land. There was no dental hygienist and no dental technician, and trying to be an army of one was killing me. Thank God the patients came only a handful at a time, and that everything was cutting-edge equipment. Otherwise I might have fled on the first day. ......But could I actually run? When they pay this much?

One thing was certain. The undersea base ran on laws different from Korea's. Here, a dentist was allowed to make the prosthetics. I'd asked Priya whether I was using the clinic alone, and whether they meant to hire anyone else, and she said the posting had already gone out—to Russia and New Zealand. Thinking of my own hiring process, even if someone new came, two months would be quick. I watched the shark's jaws draw nearer and settled it. All right. First goal: survive for two months.