Chapter 16 Joon-Gi

Chapter 16

?Joon-gi

Yang Joon-gi has thought about the woman in the house a lot. Maria.

It has been three days ago now since he took the boat from Tortola to inspect the woman's property on Gorda. His sleep has been off since. Strange dreams. He wakes now, in his tiny apartment, sweating. This new dream was too real. He was trapped in the walls of the house—and they began to close in.

The dream had started with the woman, the house.

It bothers him.

It isn't just that she is very beautiful. Most women who work in the big houses are beautiful. Nor is it that he wasn't paid, because he received a notification of payment on his phone before he even left the island. No, it is instead the sense that she was there, alone, and not in the normal sense that one might be alone, like he is, but in the sense that she was clearly waiting for something. Waiting for something to happen.

And that room, the room she had been told not to enter; he cannot stop thinking of that strange white room.

His dreams circle it, its smooth walls, its lack of perspective, its echo and the question of what it might be for.

On the few private islands that he has worked on, they had far more extreme shit: climate-controlled art storage lockups, panic rooms, cryo-chambers—it seems to him the richer people get, the stranger their lives become. Fears become visible when the super-rich try to combat them. These people seem to fear being stolen from, and aging, more than anything else. The threat of death through the actions of others or through time itself unbearable.

But that is none of his business. Moving to Miami by the age of fifty is his business, and he can be as polite and unassuming as they all need him to be as long as their money keeps stacking up in his savings account. He is on his way out, off the islands, as soon as his money is made.

Usually when he has trouble sleeping, Joon-gi thinks of his future, what his savings will afford him in Miami. A state-of-the-art two-bed high-rise apartment in a new building overlooking the ocean, nice and high, a balcony, a small kitchenette—he likes to cook. His mother taught him a few recipes before he left Seoul to study in America. He has riffed on them and created a whole repertoire of options since.

He will have plants in his Miami apartment, and time to water them. He will sit out on the balcony furniture and read with the sun on his skin and the breeze in his hair and he will never need to speak to any of his customers ever again.

But since visiting the house on Gorda, his dreams of the future cannot lull him back to sleep; instead his thoughts always fly back across the Caribbean Sea to that white basement.

His thoughts slip, like ghosts through that house. There was more house beyond those basement walls. Wiring does not lie, and the power to that room does not come from the building's main access panels.

That was the strangest thing about the whole experience: that she didn't know there was more to it. That she was not supposed to access that room in any way. Why would that be, and who could have told her that? More important, why does the house have staff with no employer present? She didn't seem to be opening up the house for an imminent arrival.

Inevitably, his thoughts drift to the security at the gatehouse. It had not seemed out of the ordinary. But the thought vaguely occurs to Joon-gi that they might somehow be keeping her in rather than keeping everyone else out.

No, he reassures himself, of course she isn't there against her will: she opened the front door for him; he watched her head out, barefoot, onto the terrace to have her lunch while he worked on the electrical fault in the guest bedroom.

It all seems normal, for that world, until he thinks of the green button in the room.

But he reminds himself that the button didn't do anything.

He goes back over the incident in his mind. Now that he really thinks about it, he realizes the woman didn't enter the room with him. In spite of everything, she remained on the threshold as if she did believe, in some sense, that something else might happen if she entered.

He thinks of how, on the boat back from the island, he tried to make a duplicate docket and realized he had lost his pencil. He must have dropped it being an idiot in that room. He cringes at his lack of self-consciousness. He wonders if the pencil might still be in that room—he can go back for it. He can see the room again.

If he goes back, he can check on her. He can tell the gate security that he arranged with the woman to return the next week to recheck the wiring in the bedroom. He can even invoice them again for the visit.

And then perhaps, if he can put these questions to rest, he will sleep again. He can stop thinking of the woman and the room. He can focus on his plans. His big plans.

So the next morning, when the call comes through from the agency to attend another property on Gorda, Joon-gi says yes.

And as he packs a lunch in his kitchenette, he promises himself he will finish this new job early and walk back to the house on the cliff. He will tell his lie about checking the rewiring, and once inside, he will ask the woman if she is okay.

He will ask to see the white room again.

He slips his food into his rucksack and then heads to the storage cupboard to collect his tool bag; he rifles through various boxes looking for something specific before finally pulling back with a triumphant laugh. And feeling like he is already winning the day by 8 a.m., he places his wall scanner neatly into his rucksack with his lunch. If he gets into the room again, he will find out for sure how far the house goes. Bag packed, he heads for the dock.