Fiction Commendation Prize: Burial

Written by Kim Sagwa and translated by Grace Payer. Below is an excerpt of the winning translation. ― ED

“Burial” is one of a collection of short stories published in Kim Sagwa's 2010 book “O2” / Courtesy of Changbi

It begins like this: We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. Or, like this: Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and having nothing to do. Or, like this: eating an American breakfast; thinly sliced cabbage and tomato, a thick beef patty, all stacked on a white bun; eating something greasy. The round plates arranged neatly on the table, the olives, bacon, pickles, and a can of Campbell's soup are all another name for Seoul. Seoul is the white flour bun on which a Cargill beef patty sits, and its other name is hell. It is hell is because it has no soul. The city is soulless, much like its people, and its landscape drapes without meaning. No longer is the passage of time indicated in the changing colors of the sky. The calendar points to it being fall, but I cannot see fall. Instead I see an expanse of apartments. They hang and lie, are half shattered and repeated, flicker and float, like a modern painting. They tremble. Maybe that's just the signs―the sodium lights and neon signs, the screen-printed banners. A dusty, white banner hanging between two trees catches the light and sways with yellow hues as a car races beneath it. This landscape hurts me. In order to keep myself from being hurt I hurriedly replace the landscape with something new. In this moment of exchange, it becomes ever slightly more beautiful, more simplified. Like a white room opening before me, or like music. The song repeats. The trees draw close and recede again. The banner flaps in the wind, sprinkling dust on my head. The trees are all diseased or have been hacked away. There is a single bus waiting at its stop. I slowly pass it. I see a department store on the other side of the street from the subway station. The colossal white building has already closed. The same song repeats for the fifth time, and five paths diverge from the point where I am stopped. In the center of this circular plaza there is a tower made up completely of flowers. This pyramid, ornamented with white flowers at the top, followed by rings of red, then yellow, is lit by four lights surrounding it. It looks like an enormous funeral garland, or like McDonalds's golden arches at two a.m. Suddenly, it feels as if the flowers are disappearing. No, the flowers begin to actually disappear before my eyes. First, the white, one by one, then the yellow. The traffic light changes and a few cars rush past, circling the tower of flowers then veering off on their own paths. Two people are laying in the entrance to the underpass, each on their own flattened cardboard boxes, on which they will spend the night. One has long hair, and the other is wearing a hat. One's plastic basket holds 300 won, and the other's only 700 more. One is missing a leg, and the other is barefoot. I put my hands in my pockets, as the one with long hair looks up at me, but I just walk past them. In the middle of the underpass I look up at the ceiling. I estimate that the tower of flowers is right above me now; that is, if the ceiling were to crash down while I stand right here, it's possible I would be smothered, buried by those blossoms. I once saw a tulip farm that had been devastated by an earthquake on a late-night news channel. The reporters stood, taking pictures. Some of the flowers, cast out of their narrow pots, would die, and others would somehow survive. If you were to leave them untouched on that ravaged earth they had the potential to become a beautiful forest, but they would not go untouched by human hands. The underpass, which connected the subway, the department store, a university, and a supermarket through its fourteen exits, was perpetually crawling with people but felt asleep as I stood in it, perhaps because of how late it was. But the air was still warm and muddy, and brought to mind high school classrooms in winter, sealed off from the cold. The scents of fried chicken and stir-fried rice cakes, kimbap and fishcake, mix and linger. I stare at the map, checking each of the fourteen exits. The scents of fried chicken and rice cakes, kimbap and fishcake, sneak their way into my stomach. I am still looking at the map. The sharp pangs of a headache burrow in through my forehead. I look up. Like clumps of earth and red and white flowers raining torrentially from a collapsing ceiling, something let out an awesome crash and burst inside my head.

When looked at from the constructivist viewpoint, Seoul is located at four hundred seventy-three dash seven, Sinsa-dong, Gangnam. From the de-constructivist viewpoint, Seoul is located at fifty-seven dash twelve, Itaewon-dong, Yongsan. But when looked at from the perspective of geo-politics, Seoul is in Pyeongyang, and from a psychological standpoint it is in Eunpyeong New Town Project for Balanced Regional Redevelopment, and to the romantics it is in Lotte World Amusement Park. And when one synthesizes all this, Seoul was at East Sixty Second Street, between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue, New York, New York. In consideration of this, we attempted to draw a map Seoul. The completed map took the shape of an American breakfast.

37, 42,

The same song plays for the thirty-seventh time, and it really feels like the same exact song. My headache grows worse as this song charges its way into my skull by route of my ears. The song grows louder as my headache grows worse. The land on which I stand begins to change directions before my eyes. That which changes direction is a city I have never been to. This is what Pyeongyang and Stockholm have in common. I no longer can see the tower of flowers, but I am still thinking about it. I think about the apartments, the subway, the tower of flowers, and the flowers which deepened to purple before vanishing little by little. When I hear things which can't be seen and see things which can't be heard, I end up either believing everything or nothing at all. For the sake of not losing one's mind, it is better to suffer only that which is felt. It is better to ignore certain sounds and images and thoughts. An invisible rod slowly pierces my forehead. Of course, this rod does not exist, and I do not bleed. Instead of bleeding, my headache grows slightly worse. I keep walking. The same song plays for the forty-second time.

We, Y and I, were drawing a map. It was winter, and we were in a cafe just off the Hongik University campus. A cup of coffee with an African name sat on top of the red table we were seated at. After tracing each street Y took a swig of it. Pens were neatly aligned on the left-hand side of the table. The same song came pouring out of a large speaker for the forty-third time. The weather was bleak and grey, and this same bleakness had worn down the red of the table. We were silent as they discussed California's budget deficit on a talk radio program. It was just as much a conversation about budget issues as it was about American health insurance, and as much about health insurance as it was about the bears and birds filling national parks. That is to say, it was a discussion about American breakfast, and, in other words, a discussion about Seoul. There was a large bruise on Y's elbow that shared the same greyish-ruddiness as the day's bleak weather and the red table. It was the shade of a hunk of ground beef cooked rare. With a single thin line, an alleyway appeared within the map. With two lines, a highway, and slowly plazas and parks, rivers and buildings were born into the map. We were thinking of making a book made solely of maps. It'll be a book about Seoul, Y said. It will be a kind of travel magazine, and also a travelogue. A travelogue that's also a novel, a novel that's also a book of interviews, a book of interviews that's also a diary, a diary that's also a photo album, a photo album that's also a poetry collection, a poetry collection that's also an encyclopedia. But in the end, it won't be a book. Who knows, it may even be a movie, or maybe coffee, or dress shoes, or maybe a mirror. A mirror that will reflect something we have never seen. Something so strange that those who look at it will envy the blind.