“My head hurts; please tell the doctor to change my medication.”

“I’m not a nurse. I’m here to see my sister.” The woman stares deep into In-hye’s eyes.

“Please help me…my head hurts so much I can’t go on. How can I live like this?”

Just then a male patient in his twenties comes and presses himself against In-hye’s back. It’s a common enough occurrence in the hospital, but it makes her nervous all the same. The patients pay no mind to conventional ideas about personal space, or it being rude to stare at other people. On the one hand, there are many of them whose utterly blank gazes indicate minds shut up in their own private worlds, but then again there are also a certain number who appear so lucid one could easily mistake them for members of the medical staff. Yeong-hye had been one of the latter kind, once.

“Nurse, why on earth doesn’t anyone ever do anything about that guy?” a familiar female patient in her thirties shouts at the head nurse, her tone aggressive. “I mean, you know perfectly well how he’s always hitting me!” The woman’s persecution mania seems to get worse every time In-hye visits.

In-hye bows to the nurses again.

“I’ll just go and have a talk with my sister.” Judging by the nurses’ expressions, they are all well and truly fed up with Yeong-hye. Clearly, none of them is holding out any hope that In-hye’s attempts at persuasion will have the slightest effect. She threads her way out carefully between the patients, taking care not to brush against them. She walks down the eastern corridor outside Yeong-hye’s ward. The door to the ward is open, and when she enters, a woman with her hair cropped short comes up to her.

“Ah, you’re visiting today?”

The woman is Hee-joo, who is receiving treatment for alcoholism and hypomania. Her body is stout but her round eyes give her a sweet look, and her voice is always somewhat hoarse. In this hospital, the patients who are in good control of their faculties look after those with more acute psychological problems, and receive a little pocket money in return; when Yeong-hye had grown difficult to manage, refusing point-blank to eat, she had come under the care of Hee-joo.

“Thanks for all your trouble,” In-hye says, and is about to force out a laugh when Hee-joo’s slightly damp hand clasps her own.

“What can we do?” Hee-joo says, her round eyes filling with tears. “They’re saying Yeong-hye might die.”

“How has she been?”

“Just now she vomited some blood. She doesn’t eat, so her stomach acid is eating away at her stomach, and she constantly has these convulsions. And now this bleeding too?” Hee-joo grows ever closer to the brink of tears. “When I first began to look after her she wasn’t like this…perhaps she might have been okay if I’d taken better care of her, do you think? I didn’t know she would end up like this. Perhaps this wouldn’t be happening to her if I hadn’t been put in charge of her.”