[JENLISA] Age of Death

Here we go again…

“Welcome to McDonalds, may I take your order?”

I feigned a smile at the guy who stood on the other side of the counter. His eyes scanned the menu on the wall behind my back as my finger continue to tap over the cash register in front of me. Even as he began to give me his order, I couldn’t keep my gaze from darting to his left cheek. The number 45 rested there, etched into his skin. It certainly felt too big to avoid looking at, even as much as I hate to see it.

Why couldn’t it be on his neck, or in his back or whatever, somewhere hidden by clothing? It always had to be on the left part of the cheek, where I couldn’t avoid it. Even if I very much liked to.

I bit my lip, anxiously. Whilst my mind run through potential causes of death. Car accident were common, so that guess wasn’t particularly creative. Maybe it’d be cancer? Or heart disease?

“I’ll take two BigMac Together Pack. To-go.” He said and my thoughts immediately disperse.

Yep. Heart disease.

I winced but quickly smile as I tap onto the monitor and repeated his order. “That’ll be ₩25,200”

Heart disease was one of the leading cause of death in South Korea, and yet here I was, working at a fast food place on the outskirts of Hongdae, with the literal ability to see peoples’ age of death, and – in case like the guy, supporting it to happen.

From my decent perspective, that might’ve seemed wrong. In fact, it certainly was. But I had a single solution to this decent dilemma. To simply ignore it in hopes that it will eventually go. I tried not to think about it. I didn’t allow myself to care about the people I was serving. Knowing when they will die made it inconvenient to get invested, to say the least, and if there was one thing I’d learned, it was that sometimes you have to let people make their own decisions.

I tried to interfere once and it didn’t worked.

He gave me an exact amount and hasty paved when I gave him his order. Next up was a woman on her phone flanked by two small children – a boy and a girl, a twin rather, both about six years old. My heart dropped into my stomach.

“Lisa, don’t look, don’t fkin’ look,” I repeatedly said in my head like a mantra, as I smile and took the order of the woman who’d die at age 81, but then she went back to her phone and made her kids order for themselves, and I had to look. The boy would live up to 72, but the girl would die at 51. I’d seen worse.

I gave the woman her total, and she distractedly handed me her driver’s license instead of her credit card. She was trying to balance her phone call and her children.

I smile and corrected her, I curiously glanced down at her date of birth. August 20, 1979. Today is August 23, 2019. She just turned 40 a couple days ago and about thirty years older than her daughter. That 81 and 51 suddenly became a lot harder for me to stomach.

I swallowed hard as we swapped cards, and then she paid, took her food, and moved on. So did I.

I can’t help not to wonder if the mother and daughter would die at the same time or just a few months apart from different causes.

“Lisa. Breathe,” a voice commanded near my ear as a hand gently squeeze my arm. Hoony oppa.

I must’ve looked as tense as I felt.

Seunghoon oppa or as what he liked to be called, Hoony was a 27 year old college dropout who worked here with me. He was the only person who knew what I could do, and that was because he could do it too. We’d spotted each other instantly when we’d met and just known. It’d been hard not to. We were both kind of obvious about our obsessions, cheek-looking obsession.

When I met Hoony oppa, the first thing he’d done was to glance to mine even as I’d stared up at his. His arched eyebrow and my wide-eyed look in response had been all it’d taken to confirm we were both looking for the same thing.

Hoony would die at age 76. In the meantime, he made me promise not to tell him his number – in the irony of all ironies, we could see the number of every person we met, even when we didn’t want to, but we couldn’t see our own. Hoony also refused to tell me my number, which was probably for the best.

Neither of us could remember waking up one day with this awful ability. We’d both just always been this way. We had little else in common, but the side effects our special “quirk” had caused over the years – mild to moderate depression, extreme cynicism, and emotional detachment, to name a few – were enough to eventually bring us together. He was my only friend, and I wanted to keep it that way. Even people who’d die at 100 still had a visible expiration date – or at least to people like Hoony and me, anyway.

I wasn’t really equipped to deal with having multiple friends whose age of death were constantly staring me in the face. My father and Hoony were enough.

But even the two of them would die eventually. Everyone did. It was inevitable. It was one thing to know that like a normal person did, to have it in the back of my mind, only to creep up every once in a while. And when it did creep up in the mind of a normal person, perhaps be a brief moment of existential crisis, and maybe some of the momentary panic or fear that comes with being actively self-aware of our own mortality.

When would it happen? How would it happen? Would it hurt?

But for normal people, that moment would fade, and life would go on. It wouldn’t for me. That moment was my life. It was one thing to know that we were all going to die; it was entirely reminded every time I looked at another person. Everyone was just a number to me, because that was all I could allow them to be.

About three hours into my four-hour shift, Hoony and I took our breaks together and sat outside in the alley behind McDonalds, our backs pressed to the wall of the building as we both look outside the busy street of Hongdae.

“I got a woman, looked to be about early to mid-twenties. Age of death: 26,” he told me.

“Wow,” I murmured and ignored the wry smile he cracked. Hoony was trying to teach me to take this whole thing less seriously, so we started to play an awful game wherein we both try to one-up each other every day. Whoever could get the most ill-fated customer won.

It was a little too morbid for me, but I humored him. It was his way of trying to turn those very real people with very real ages of death into characters. The goal was to trick ourselves into caring less. Sometimes, for just a moment, it will work, and I’d forget. I’d feel a little bit better.

“Mother and daughter who are gonna die within the same year. Possibly simultaneously.”

“How old?” He asked as his gaze focused mainly on the street performers.

“51 and 81.”

“Ah, that’s not bad.” He drag a word and sigh, we both dreamed of becoming an idol. It’s just. We’re too old to dream of something big and who knows? We might die earlier than our age of death if we ever did pursue our dreams.

Hoony and I came out here five times a week. “They’ll live a while.” Again, he added. Both our gaze focused mainly on the street performers whose dance routines were so captivating that I was completely mesmerized by them.

“I guess so.”

“Lisa, breathe.” Hoony repeated his command from earlier. “People die. It’s inevitable. We’re just two of the tragic ones who happen to see how much time they have left.”

“Don’t you ever think about whether or not they will live their lives differently if they knew?” I asked him. It was the reason sometimes I wished I knew when it’d be my time to go. There were things I wanted to do. Places I wanted to see. Hence I even want to go skydiving and performed in a crowd. It’ll be nice to know when my deadline was. But the wariness probably wasn’t worth it.

“Of course,” Hoony agreed. “But as I said, death is still inevitable. We can’t change the number. It never worked for either of us. You still lost your mother and I still lost my sister. So there’s no use upsetting anyone. And besides… they wouldn’t believe us if we told them. We’ll just get to be locked up in some psych ward and ignored. It happened before to others.” He added.

“Right,” I agreed, and tilted my head upward to stare at the sun above our heads. Summer was almost over. I’d be starting my senior year of college in the fall. My job here was temporary; something my dad had encouraged me to do to help save money for college expenses. In my more cynical moments, I sometimes wondered if I’d even live long enough to finish my last year of college or to get a real job.

“Do you ever wonder why we all try so hard to live until the age 80 or more?” I asked Hoony abruptly. “What’s the point? You go to school, then you live to work and work to live until you retire, and then you die, either painfully or not. And that’s if you’re lucky. It all seems so pointless sometimes.” I added.

“Hell if I know. They have an entire industry dedicated to making sure people don’t feel pessimistic enough to ask the questions you’re asking now.”

“Psychiatry?” I asked amused.

“Religion,” he corrected with a smirk. I laughed and thwacked his leg. “YAH! It’s true! Religion basically comes down to ‘Please don’t kill yourselves; we promise you’ll get rewarded for dying unwillingly instead as long as you aren’t a murderer. Or a homosexual.’”

I laughed again, harder this time. “So I’m screwed then? And Pabo! I’m a Buddhist.”

“I knew it! I knew you’ll be killed and whatever.” he joked and then moved to get to his feet.

I checked my phone to see that we’d been outside for fourteen minutes now.

“Only indirectly,” I told him, not entirely kidding.

“Stop that,” he chastised. “It’s not our responsibility to monitor strangers’ lives. Look out for yourself, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.” And I did. Whatever all-powerful being had chosen to assign the numbers on our left cheek – whether it was a God, or something evil, or just plain old fate – chose to give my mom a 46. She’d had me when she was 29, and she died four and a half years ago, when I was 17.

Before then, I’d spent years crying. She died in a car wreck. I cried feeling a completely useless person who knew my mother will die in that year. I wasn’t sure how I could’ve stopped it.. Hoony liked to say that there was nothing I could’ve done, but I was sure he only believed that because he was convinced fate was the cause of the numbers.

He was also a staunch Atheist, which seemed counter-intuitive given that the religious were all about things being predetermined, but I hadn’t ever really asked him to explain further.

As for myself? I really had no idea why the numbers were there, or why I could see them. I’d done a lot of observing over the years, and I’d never seen a number change. But I’d also not developed too many long-term relationships, so it wasn’t like I was checking up on people I used to know to see if their numbers were still the same.

Maybe they’d be different if I did. Maybe my out-of-shape Uncle could decide to go on a run every morning and it’d change his 73 to a 74 or something. Or maybe he would die of cancer at 73 and there was no stopping it. Maybe he would die of cancer at 73 and there was a way to stop it. Or maybe it’d be a car crash, like my mom, and if I ever convinced my uncle to never leave his house, I’d see his 73 jump instantaneously to an 86.

It was easy to see how I could drive myself crazy with this stuff. Which was why Hoony’s advice was to just live life as though we weren’t special. His sister had died of cancer, and although he didn’t like to talk about it much, I’d gotten bits and pieces of the story over the course of the past few months. Her older sister died when she was 21.

She’d had that 21 on her left cheek for as long as he could remember, and he’d practically driven himself crazy trying to figure out how to change it. When she was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer at age 20, he’d realized there was no way he could have. Cancer was so rare for someone her age that he wouldn’t have ever thought to suggest having her checked for it, and even if he somehow had, and even if he’d managed to get the exact type of cancer correct, no one would’ve taken him seriously.

I was in a similar situation with my mom’s car crash. What could I have done? I’d spent the years leading up to her death trying my best. I’d told her to be safe every day when she’d left for work. If she’d gotten sick, I’d helped my dad nurse her back to health. I’d spent years having panic attacks in the night because I’d been so worried about her. And in the end, all I’d have had to do was convince her to stay home on one particular evening. But I’d had no way of knowing that for certain at the time, and now she was gone.

And maybe fate or whoever had known that I wouldn’t know what to do, and maybe that was why she’d gotten a 46. And if that was the case, I had a hard time thinking well of that omniscient being. It was no wonder Hoony was an Atheist; the idea that something intelligent enough to design thinking, feeling, living creatures would then assign them unchangeable expiration dates was horrifying.

When my work shift ended, I said goodbye to Hoony and drove home to my dad. He was waiting with a plate of chicken tenders and fries and an only mildly reassuring 83 on his left cheek. He would live for a long time, but I knew I’d wind up counting down the days after he hit about 80 years old. Assuming I was still around then, of course.

But I guess maybe there was always a small chance his 83 would find a way to turn into something higher. Maybe if enough time had passed. Maybe if he did something, anything, differently one day. Maybe if he did something that God or fate hadn’t been counting on.

And I wished every day for that. To have some proof, or even just some hope that we weren’t all essentially sitting around waiting to hit our predetermined expiration dates.

It’d be nice to have some evidence that we control our own destinies, I think.