APEX ‹𝟹 LIPSOUL

Eleven

The air is perversely warm for such a day in the waning of winter. Everything is imbued with a strange and beautiful sentience. Everything feels that much more alive. The testing facility twenty-five minutes south of Seoul is still the same as it was the year before, tall sheets of concrete and cinder block offices rising high and small windows hammered into the sides and the parking lot around the back of the building, the testing track beyond. And yet it feels bigger. Feels like something has changed. Inside is the same story. All concrete and white plaster, whiteboards scrawled with math equations and telemetry data and geometric shapes and doodles of brake calipers and rear wings and suspension dampers, computers running through stacks of coded numbers several minutes in length, long forms of race analysis printed on sheets of graph paper, stacks of laminate folders on the crowded tables, empty coffee cups and the smell of coffee, the sharp tang of the pressed beans from the coffeemaker in the en-suite kitchen, the wilted yellowing of the pencil stubs sat neatly in the glass on the desk by the rear of the meeting room as it looks out over the track in the cool afternoon day, the clock slanted on the bare wall going ticktickticktick, faint odor of fruit and cologne and motor oil and there's that whiff of coffee again. A thin knife of warm sunlight breaches from the far window. Somebody coughs, somebody walks with feet pressed gently into the matted folds of the coffee coloured carpet. Yes. Everything feels just that little bit altered.

It's a trick of the mind that Jinsoul feels this when she walks into the room. There's a spring in her step as she greets each of the mechanics in turn, says thank you, goes on through to stash her bag in her locker and change clothes in the washroom. There's a smile on her face, too. It's a smile she has become used to wearing like a badge of honour over the past twelve weeks or so. She sees Haseul for the first time in almost two months in the meeting room in the back of the office. Her hair is cropped short and delicate. It makes her look astonishingly elegant. She stands side-on by the window and the dim slats of sunlight run over her face like liquid gold and seep on down her gray and orange overalls. On the front by the breast pocket is printed the word APEX in bright orange lettering. Stitched into the seams of the arms are the badges of their sponsors, BMW, Vodafone, and Lindt Chocolate and SK Telecom. She's busy reading something when Jinsoul comes in and stands in the doorway and waits for her to notice. For a long time she does not. She wets her thumb and flips back a sheet from the stapled document in her hand and shifts from one foot to the other. The concentration evident in the way her eyebrows slant a slight at the corners is rather amusing.

'You busy, then?' Jinsoul says. Haseul looks up and catches sight of her smiling and smiles in return.

'Sorry,' she says. 'Didn't hear you come in. When did you get here?'

'Like, ten minutes ago.'

She drops the paper on the table and pulls Jinsoul in for a great and warm hug. Jinsoul smells the bitter and paradoxical richness of the instant coffee from her, locked away somewhere under the faint scent of her perfume. She steps back and looks at Jinsoul again in her racing overalls. 'You look ready to go,' she says.

'I am.'

'You sure you don't want to sit down and hash things out first? You know, check what we've been doing?'

'I've always said the best way to learn is on the job.'

'You've never said that.'

'No?'

Haseul shakes her head.

'Well. I mean, I thought about it. The quickest way to figure things out is to get in that car and take it for a drive around that track. And we can go from there.'

'You sound very confident.'

'Do I have any reason not to be?'

'No,' Haseul says. 'I just, you know. I didn't expect it.'