To My Dearest Roseanne- Chapter 33
As soon as Cho signed all the formalities in the presence of the committee, they informed her she should expect the first instalment of the scholarship by the end of the month. The monthly payment was 1000 Po coins, so the total sum of the scholarship she won amounted to 6000 Po coins. This was a little over 2 million won, so it wasn't bad, Cho thought.
She walked Emily to the bike, holding her jacket and helmet like a loyal butler. When Emily started dressing herself to mount her beloved Kawasaki Ninja, she looked at Cho and a shade of fear flashed across her face.
"Girl, you look worse than me," she said.
Cho leaned over and examined herself in the bike's mirror. Emily wasn't exaggerating. Her skin was pale, the lips were swollen, and a string of blood was dripping from her nose.
"Did you fall in the bathroom or something, Cho?"
"No, nothing like that."
Cho kept looking in the mirror, but then a shot of pain jettisoned through her spine, almost as if she were electrocuted by an invisible taser. She collapsed on the bike and let out a scream. Once again, she heard the pulsating vibration with full force.
"Oh shit, Cho, we need to get you to a hospital!"
"No, no hospital!"
"Are you crazy or what? Grab on to me. My mom will help us."
Emily mounted the bike in a hurry. She put her helmet on Cho and instructed her to hold on tight. Cho was tensing so much in pain that she began squeezing Emily's waist.
The two rode off with a squeak of tyres. Emily never rode so fast before.
***
People tend to forget about this in the world of today, but before the digital age, there was this magical phenomenon by which you could remember an event by the sole act of taking a picture of it. At least this is what Cho had experienced.
Her beloved mother, her own Liz, crouched next to her, when she was 4 years old, and pointed to the wall of light made by the sunset down the street. Cho looked in that direction and Robert took a photograph.
On another occasion, Robert was making a sandcastle with Cho by the seaside, which was immortalised in a Polaroid film by Liz.
There were also instances of photo shoots in which her parents were not present. She remembered a journalist who came to kindergarten to take a group snapshot. She was the only white girl in the group. Everyone was lined up for the picture when one of the caretakers dropped a tray with empty plates. The whole thing smashed against the floor and she cried, "Mamma Mia!" not "Oh my God!" or "Aigo!" but "Mamma Mia!"
Nobody has taken any pictures of Cho since she became six years old. But she no longer needed a camera lens to memorise events. She wished she could forget what happened to her between the age of six and sixteen.
The erratic polyphony of computer sounds made her come round. She was lying in a large tube that kept making noises. A laser pointer was above her skull. The light barely made it through an exposed end of the tube. Cho panicked and wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, but her head was locked in a sort of plastic cage.
"Please sit still, we will finish soon," somebody said over the intercom.
Cho kept fidgeting with the cage whilst the tube kept making unnerving crackles, hums, and buzzes like a broken PC. Eventually, the table on which she was positioned started sliding out of the tube.
The moment the machine went silent, a woman in a doctor's outfit entered the exam room. Her hair was as black as night, and so were the eyes.
"I told you to sit still," she said, releasing the bolts of plastic protection and freeing Cho.
"Where am I? What happened?"
The doctor sighed.
"You passed out when we injected you with dye."
Cho noticed a clotted pinch after a needle on her arm. She tried to touch it, but the back pain awakened as she moved. The doctor placed her arm on Cho's chest, wanting her to stay still.
"Try to keep calm, sweetheart. I know you're in pain. My daughter brought you here and made a ruckus across the entire hospital. You're in the Asclepius Health Center."
"Emily?"
"Yes, I'm her mother. My name is Molly, and she told me you are Roseanne, right? Now I need to answer some questions, Roseanne, and be honest with me, okay?"
Cho nodded.
"Good. My daughter is so reckless that she used to do this horrible thing the kids on the internet call 'Urban Exploring'. When I found out about it, I minced her butt so hard that she couldn't sit for a week. Did you take part in these escapades?"
"No, Ma'am. I don't know what you are talking about."
"Or maybe she gave you some souvenirs from these explorations? A key chain, a bracelet, or some pendant?"
"No, she gave me nothing."
"Have you eaten or drank anything from an unknown source?"
"No, really."
"Have you ever been near a factory or a waste disposal site on your own?"
"Never."
"Where are your parents working?"
"My father is a truck driver and my mother is an unemployed person suffering from physical disability. Why do you keep asking such strange questions?"
"Because of this." Molly took out a table with digits. "You have a significant drop of white blood cells, which are responsible for fighting diseases. In medical terms, this is called leukopenia."
"Leukopenia? So when I get sick, an infection can kill me?"
"That's correct. There are many causes of Leukopenia, so we checked your bone marrow." Molly showed another chart filled with digits." It appears that your DNA got scrambled so badly, it can't send instructions to produce white blood cells."
Cho tried looking at the chart. There was a void in her mind, which quickly got stuffed with panic and hopelessness. However, the picture started coming together. Cho remembered that once she read a book about radiation. It explained that healthy DNA is responsible for maintaining a healthy body, but radiation actually cripples DNA, which makes people die a slow and painful death.
She recalled the most horrific case study from the book: the case of Hisashi Ouchi, a man who was exposed to 17 sieverts of radiation at the Tokai nuclear plant. It should be noted that the average person can safely absorb about 3.65 millisieverts of ionising radiation in a lifetime. As a result, Ouchi became the most radioactive man in the world.
Ouchi was kept alive for 83 days by a medical team that attempted a bone marrow transplant, blood transfusion, and stem cell grafts. His skin started peeling away like dry wallpaper. His intestines couldn't absorb water. His lungs stopped working altogether. His heart was so worn out that he suffered three heart attacks until his body eventually gave up. Throughout all this, he felt extreme pain minute by minute, second by second.
"But I didn't expose myself to any radiation if that's what you mean!" Cho shouted, her body shaking at the thought of sharing the same fate as Hisashi Ouchi.
"And that's the strangest part. We checked. There is no radioactivity within you, but you suffer the symptoms. This knocked the socks off all the doctors in the hospital."
Cho sensed a gulp of paper in her stomach. It immediately turned into a fiery ball.
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