TITANIC ~ A Yoonmin Story

Make It Count

As the big hydraulic jib swings one of the Mir subs out over the water. Kyong Tonghyon walks as he talks with Park Heechul, the partner's rep. They weave among deck cranes, launch crew, sub maintenance guys.

"The partners are pissed." Heechul says to Tonghyon.

"Heechul, buy me time. I need time."

"We're running thirty thousand a day, and we're six days over. I'm telling you what they're telling me. The hand is on the plug. It's starting to pull."

"Well you tell the hand I need another two days!" Tonghyon retaliates. "Heechul, Heechul, Heechul... we're close! I smell it. I smell ice. He had the diamond on... now we just have to find out where it wound up. I just gotta work him a bit more. Okay?"

Tonghyon turns and sees Jimin's granddaughter, Park Yongmi, standing behind him. She has overheard the past part of his dialogue with Heechul. He goes to her and hustles her away from Heechul, toward a quite spot on the deck. "Hey, Yongmi. I need to talk to you for a second."

"Don't you mean work me?"

"Look, I'm running out of time. I need your help."

"I'm not going to help you browbeat my hundred-and-one year old grandfather. I came down here to tell you to back off."

"Yongmi..." Tonghyon starts, with undisguised desperation. "You gotta understand something. I've bet it all to find the Heart of the Ocean. I've got all my dough tied up in this thing. My wife even divorced me over this hunt. I need what's locked inside your grandpa's memory." He holds out his hand. "You see this? Right here?"

She looks at his hand, palm up. Empty. Cupped, as if around imaginary shape. "What?"

"That's the shape my hand's gonna be when I hold that thing. You understand? I'm not leaving here without it."

"Look, Tonghyon Oppa, he's going to do this his way, in his own time. Don't forget he contacted you. He's out here for his own reasons, God knows what they are."

"Maybe he wants to make peace with the past."

"What past? He has never once, not once, ever said a word about being on the Titanic until two days ago."

"Then we're all meeting your grandfather for the first time."

Yongmi looks at him hard. "You think he was really there?"

"Oh yeah. Yeah, I'm a believer. He was there."

゛・。☆。・゛★゛・。☆。・゛★゛・。☆。・゛★゛・。☆。・゛★゛・。

Jimin walks into the sunlight. He is seemingly dressed and walking with purpose. He unlatches the gate to go down into third class. The steerage men on the deck stop what they're doing and stare at him. 

The social center of steerage life. It is stark by comparison to the opulence of first class, but it is a loud, boisterous place. There are mothers with babies, kids running between the benches yelling in several languages and being scolded in several more. There are old women yelling, men playing chess, girls doing needlepoint and reading dime novels. There is even an upright piano and Kim Seokjin is noodling around it. 

Three boys, shrieking and shouting, are scrambling around chasing a rat under the benches, trying to whomp it with a shoe and causing general havoc. Yoongi is playing with five-year-old Sok Minji, drawing funny faces together in his sketchbook.