Jaehee was gone like the wind, and there was no point in following her. She had, after all, been a champion sprinter up until middle school.

I was left to pay the consultation fee: 48,900 won. Feeling sorry about the whole thing, I said to the nurse:

—I’ll get the model uterus back to you right away. She has no endurance, she won’t have gone far.

The nurse answered me with a long sigh.

Sure enough, Jaehee was only a few steps outside the building, hugging the model womb as she leaned on a utility pole. As soon as she saw me, she waved an arm in the air, asking for a light. I took out a lighter from my pocket and held it out to the Marlboro Red in her mouth. Jaehee stared at the model uterus and said:

—It’s so fucking old.

—He must’ve bought it on graduation day. It says he entered SNU medical school in 1988.

—How did you find that out?

—I was so bored I read his doctor’s license on the wall.

—I’ve made a decision. Never deal with shits from Seoul National University.

—Fuck SNU for a minute, why did you have to do that? If he wasn’t going to do the procedure, you should’ve just left.

—I wouldn’t have screamed at him like that for no reason. He’s a psychopath. Listen to this.

As soon as she mentioned she was pregnant, the doctor had immediately made her lie down on the examining bed and administered an ultrasound. The results showed that the fetus (which is what he called the clump of cells) was about eight weeks along.

—He demanded that the father come in and see it, and I told him that you weren’t the father and that in fact I had no idea who the father was.

—Would it have killed you to lie? Just make shit up!

—You know I cannot tell a lie.

Which was a lie in itself—the truth was quite the ­opposite—she just couldn’t ever tell a lie when she really needed to. The doctor had gone on a rant about prophylactics and the need for chaste living for over twenty minutes. He flipped through her chart and said her recurring bouts of bladder inflammations could be from promiscuous sexual intercourse and began to berate her about her moral looseness and wild drinking habits. Jaehee, noticing the cross hanging on the wall, had suppressed her anger and replied:

—You know, it’s thanks to sluts like me that you can make a living.

—I’m only saying this because you feel like a daughter to me. What are you going to do later on if you’re so immoral? Do you know what the worst thing for a woman’s body is? Promiscuity and unsafe sex. Don’t you understand?

—Actually, pregnancy and birth are the worst things for a woman’s body.

—What are you saying?