The man did not hide his discomfort.
His mouth kept spewing complaints, and his face twisted as if he genuinely felt sick.
Then, grumbling as if he had stepped in something nasty, he continued on his way.
Others were no different.
They didn’t overreact to the man’s corpse.
Some seemed relieved they weren’t standing in front of the body, letting out a sigh of relief, while others checked to see if any bodily fluids had splattered on their suits. Some were running around as if so busy they couldn’t afford to care, and others were munching on sandwiches, completely indifferent even after witnessing a person become a corpse right in front of them.
It was quite a bizarre scene.
It felt almost like it was stimulating the very scent of perfume.
As Jinseong pondered this and stared at them, someone approached him and spoke.
“Hey, young man.”
When Jinseong turned his head, there stood a man.
A wrinkled suit, a scruffy face, a messy beard, and a pungent smell of alcohol and sweat emanating from his body.
He looked like a homeless man.
He smiled, as if to show that he meant no harm.
When he smiled, his teeth were visible, caked with bits of food and plaque that didn’t seem to have been cleaned in ages, with some blue residue that looked like it might be mouthwash.
“First time on Wall Street?”
He chuckled as he asked Jinseong.
Jinseong nodded at his words.
“Yes. It’s my first time today.”
“Hehe, then you must be very surprised by that scene….”
He looked at him with a strange gaze.
That gaze felt like a veteran employee looking at a new hire who just walked into the company, mixed with pity at how a bright young man ended up in such a place.
He gestured for Jinseong to come closer and led him to a spot near a flower bed.
Then he plopped down onto a mat and pointed at the space beside him, inviting him to sit.
Jinseong complied and sat next to him. The man, confirming his presence, pulled out a palm-sized bottle of mouthwash from his suit pocket. He opened the cap and…
Gulp, gulp.
He poured it down his throat as if it were not mouthwash but alcohol.
“Khuh.”
Then he reacted like he had just taken a shot.
“Care for a drink?”
“No, I’m good.”
“Really? That’s fine.”
The man offered Jinseong the mouthwash bottle out of habit but took it back to drink when Jinseong declined. Once the bottle was half empty, he tucked it back away as if saying he needed to save it and looked at Jinseong.
“Hey, what school did you go to?”
“School?”
“Pennsylvania? Harvard? Virginia? Yale? Chicago?”
Swish.
The man asked while rubbing his beard with his sleeve, as if trying to wipe off the mouthwash that trickled down from his lip.
“Not an American college, huh? Then from the East?”
Hehe.
The man chuckled ominously.
“Honestly, I just feel like Asian faces all look similar, so I can’t really tell where you’re from. Oh, it’s not a racist comment. I genuinely can’t tell the difference. Well, it seems like Asians don’t differentiate our Western faces well either, so it’s probably the same?”
“….”
“Still, I can roughly guess. China, Japan, Korea. One of those, right?”
“Korea.”
“Right. Korea… What universities do they have again…? Not sure. To be honest, the only university I can think of in East Asia is Peking University.”
The man said that and moved his hand as if he was going to tuck it away.
But it seemed like he meant to signal instinctively rather than intentionally. He halted the motion midway and brought it down again.
His hand was slightly trembling.
Like that of an alcoholic.
“Anyway, you’ve gone to a good college and received a good education. That’s why you’re here. A hundred years ago, it would have been the City of London, but now Wall Street is the center of finance.”
“….”
Jinseong didn’t respond to his words.
The man wasn’t making his statement seeking a response from Jinseong, after all.
What he was saying to Jinseong was also a kind of monologue.
A lament.
Yeah.
The man was bouncing his complaints off Jinseong.
“You’re here because you want to be a wolf. I know. I get it… all the folks wandering around here are like that. They all want money. Me, you, those bastards running around over there. All of them. Every single one…!”
“….”
“But here’s the thing. This place is a den of psychopaths.”
The man gazed at Jinseong with vacant eyes.
“This neighborhood is insane.”
He looked as if he were seeing someone who had just awakened from a long dream.
Having suffered through a lengthy nightmare, he barely woke up, only to despair at the fact that a nightmarish reality awaited him.
“Did you see? A person fell and died, yet no one even glanced at it.”
“Yes. I saw.”
“Do you think that’s normal?”
“….”
“If you have eyes and a brain, you’d know that it’s not normal.”
“….”
“This isn’t a place where only devilish bastards roam. A person is dead, and it shouldn’t be like this….”
The man finally couldn’t hold back anymore and reached back into his pocket, pulling out the mouthwash again and gulping it down.
Gulp, gulp.
Tilting his head back, he poured the mouthwash into his stomach with madness that was hard to describe.
Thud-!
He threw the empty bottle behind him.
“Heh, isn’t it strange? Drinking this when I don’t even have cavities in my stomach.”
“….”
“I have an incredible fact to tell you. This mouthwash, you see, contains alcohol. What does that mean? It means it gets you drunk!”
Hahaha!
The man laughed, perhaps feeling the effects of the alcohol.
Then suddenly, he wiped the smile off his face.
“If you drink this shit, you’ll feel holes forming in your esophagus and stomach. It burns, it hurts, it’s like being stabbed with needles. And the more you drink, the wider the holes become. The pain that felt like being pricked with needles morphs into something like being stabbed with a dagger, and that feels like being pierced by a sword. There’s probably a big hole in my stomach.”
Maybe even big enough for those runners over there to poke through.
“Just how many of those damn bastards are even human?”
The man muttered as he looked straight at Jinseong.
His sunken eyes were heavily shadowed.
As if they were telling the tale of the suffering he had endured.
“This used to be a place full of wolves, you know. But at some point, it started to feel like it was full of monsters instead. I, I still don’t know why it changed….”
He leaned back roughly against something nearby.
As if he couldn’t handle his body due to drunkenness.
Perhaps, it was just that he wasn’t trying to hold on anymore.
“The stock prices started to go insane. It felt like madness couldn’t even be measured, as if they were proving that human insanity is unquantifiable. The analysts, or maybe anal suckers, couldn’t read anything properly and ended up dying while licking other people’s buttholes.”
“….”
“It’s not a metaphor. They really died. Do you know how many of those who went through the door came out the window? One died with a clunk, another with a crash. Hahahahaha.”
“….”
“There were so many deaths that do you know what they started saying? If you’re gonna die, don’t break any windows; just drop dead. They’d set up a place so you could jump off the roof, telling you to jump from there. If you jumped from there, you’d avoid the parking lot, dodge the sidewalks. They even drew a round target down below! Like they were kindly instructing you to dive right there. Hahahaha, damn it. Crazy bastards….”
“….”
“Yeah, that was just the beginning….”
The man’s pronunciation started to become slurred.
As if his tongue were entangled in drunkenness.
“When the stocks started to fluctuate, the wolves began to go berserk. But for the wolves to rampage, someone had to analyze the situation, and every analysis was wrong. So what happened? They all trusted their instincts and went crazy like lunatics….”
“Hmmm.”
“Long-term investment? Value investment? Where are those? In this world where solid companies easily die? What would you believe to stick with? It’s just following madness. Since you can’t analyze madness, you gotta move with it….”
“….”
“Losses? Safety? Go eat shit. Investors and banks have all lost their minds; there’s no way that could work. They’ve all gone mad. They’ve all gone absolutely insane….”
The man’s words now resembled sobbing.
“Losses keep accumulating, and you need to make up for that loss. Investors, companies, banks, the government…. Hahaha. Damn it. In this shit-storm, there was nothing that could be done. Nothing could be done….”
The man slowly closed his eyes.
It seemed he couldn’t resist the sleepiness that overwhelmed him with the drunkenness.
“My money, my assets….”
Then he escaped just like that.
To the sweet world of dreams, sweeter than this nightmarish reality.
Just as silence was about to settle again in that moment….
“You must have been bored.”
Someone spoke to Jinseong.
“You did well not to doze off listening to the common loser’s ramblings. Your patience is impressive.”
When Jinseong turned his head, there was a man with arms made of crystal.
