I had little time, or money, and my car was shot, so my father paid for me to take the train from Greensboro to Atlanta, though he could easily have refused and had his preference of keeping me home, to make my appointment at the Korean Consulate and arrived too early to walk around abandoned downtown and be blown sideways coming around the corner of a skyscraper surprised by the city winds chambered at random down the broad tunnels the buildings make of the boulevards.
When I arrived for the interview prerequisite to being granted my visa a small old woman was disputing loudly with a harried diplomat and I took a seat next to a blonde girl who could only be there for the same purpose. The same man, suddenly mild and speaking relaxed English, took us into a conference room and asked us why we wanted to go and if we’d stay our contract out, with little concern for our answers. I left him my passport with misgivings and the interview was over.
With hours yet before the train back I had a sandwich alongside Atlanta businessmen then wandered into a Mellow Mushroom and ordered a beer, taking prim sips in hopes of making it last until time to return to the station.
Exhausted on the way home I fell asleep with my laptop on the seat beside me. When I woke it was gone – not under the seat or in my bag, checked and rechecked. I asked my aisle-mate and suspected him. The conductress offered no assistance and I subsided into a resigned misery looking out the window at the dark and both sides of the track seemed the wrong one.
Two days later, feeling a little sick, I opened the smallest possible FedEx package to find my passport with the addition of a hologrammed visa glued neatly into (out of many unused ones) page 13. Issue date: 2009/04/01; Period of Sojourn: 1 year. My father with the same baleful generosity bought me a new computer and I began to pack, as much as I could fit into two pieces of checked luggage, carryon and shoulderbag. Bring as much as you can, who knows what they have there. The next day an email came with an itinerary for a flight departing April 9th.
On the day my father drove me to Piedmont Triad International Airport and I left him tearful at security with a knot in my stomach, afraid of flying and afraid of what lay at the end of my three flights. Two hundred dollars provided through further paternal generosity in my pocket to hold me over until the agreed upon first payment of 300,000 won to cover initial expenses. I connected in Minneapolis with 5 hours to kill, and went back and forth through security outside into cold I didn’t know could be found in April to smoke.
On the flight I found myself next to a woman visiting friends in Tokyo. I took a xanex and paid for one beer. In-flight entertainment was projected onto a screen at the front of the cabin and I craned my neck around the very tall man in front of me. I tried to read, or sleep, the 747 rolling on the jet stream the way ocean liners must once have rolled almost pleasantly on storm swells.
Eleven hours later we landed in Tokyo with two hours before my last connection to Incheon International. Passing through security 18 hours from my first departure I left the backpack holding all my shoes but the pair I wore and went sprinting down corridors to find it sitting unguarded by the checkpoint, then came puffing back to my gate to wait for the final flight.
It was less than three hours from Narita to Incheon but we were served free sushi and beer. I went through immigration and baggage claim and customs in the mental twilight of oncoming jet lag and found a Korean man who spoke no English holding a sign with my name. He took my bags and I struggled to follow his brisk pace to the Kia idling at the curb.
The drive was longer than expected, through outskirts of Incheon into outskirts of Seoul without nearing the center of either. I looked into the dark at the buildings covered in the foreign script I should have studied passing and passing with no idea of our destination or nearing it. After a long time and suddenly we arrived at a building and stopped in full blaze of urban Korean night. It was a little before twelve.
The driver took my bags again and led me up to apartment 903. I still have the key. He gestured for me to remove my shoes and I followed him around as he showed me things: this is how you turn on the hot water, here the heat and AC, the TV and the elaborate toilet. Finally he handed me the key and left. There was a loaf of white bread and peanut butter left on the counter for me, a liter of milk in the fridge, but I had no appetite. I found a battered pack of Pall Mall lights in my coat and smoked, looking through the window, my head buzzing in the center of a profound silence above the muted street noise. After a calendar day of travel, solitary in crowds, I was alone. I didn’t know whether it was time to sleep or not. I didn’t know where I was.
