Graffiti Ghost

I arrive in the street cramped with huge lit signs of various shops and restaurants. There is a wrapper stuck to the sole of my trekking boot already. My shoulders ache – the trip from the airport included a lot of walking. A smell of hot bibimbap comes from the nearest door, enticing me to go in, take off my backpack – which is heavy with everything I own – and order a bottle of soju on top of everything. No matter how the world changes, humans still believe that a full belly and some alcohol sort the problems, if only temporarily.

I pull out my phone, with its back panel secured by blue insulation tape. The battery in it had to be exchanged so many times, and the tiny plastic legs kicked the bucket long ago. I remember the address – I always do. The amount of times my mobile was almost stolen has long crossed the one hundred marking. Once my luck might run out. And, of course, that stupid battery – they simply aren’t made for my lifestyle.

Though the address is fixed in my mind, all these signs in New Korean are disorienting. It takes time for the phone to connect to the network and the translating lens to start working. I wave the phone between the signs, walk up and down the street. People pay little attention to me – tourism is still a thing, though I might look a bit too shabby for one. Finally, I discover the small plaque with the name of my hostel and buzz the intercom. The artificial voice asks me for the booking and ID confirmation codes one after another. I am surprised to see a living human being when I reach the reception inside. Usually there is just this bauble of a speaker that tells you to scan your fingerprints and manipulates the key boxes, which shoot out from the front panel if everything is in order. This is not Park Hyatt after all.

The girl is clearly bored. She keeps asking questions. Where are you from? Is it your first time? Are you visiting someone? Need a guide or advice where to go? Hungry? She could order some take-away – she had not eaten herself yet. She must be going nuts with the lethargy of this place if she is flirting with me. I might have the appearance of a cheerful, plump, bearded man, but after all the time on the road I definitely lost most of my presentability. I make things up as I answer and politely reject her offer, saying I’ve already eaten some street food. It’s only as I trundle up the rickety stairs to the very top, I realise – my bio is fabricated, but I can’t fake the itinerary. The screen showed her all the planes and trains I had taken to get here along with the chunk of my previous destinations. She is too young and excited to see the gaps there – all those miles I had to hitchhike or trek on foot. She only sees a possible knight who might take her away from here if she just hooks him.

The ceiling is low and the window is just a narrow slit underneath it. I have the top bunk on that side, however, so when I climb up, after hiding my backpack under the pillow, I can see bits of the city. It’s not the view you would get from one of the skyscrapers’ suits – just a bit of a road vista and another street sign, but somehow it creates more authenticity, I realise as I quickly fall asleep.

I wake up with a headache: sleeping on the backpack stuffed with anything but clothes is not recommended by health professionals, but in such places you can’t trust the lockers. The girl downstairs surely has a master key, or the phone number of the manager who has it. I sneak to the showers downstair and, using my own master coin, have a quick wash. It does little to the old grime, which needs to be soaked off in some hot spring, but I feel at least a little bit refreshed.

While the receptionist is off to the toilet, I leave the place unnoticed. If everything goes well, I will not have to return. Outside, it is a bright, sunny day. I take off the jacket and let the light warm breeze stir the tiny hair on my arms. It feels so good that I set aside my restrictions and order a corndog from the first stall I see. Instead of following my route, I turn into the city centre. I walk among the tall buildings, the traffic roaring on the wide roads. I get to the embankment of what is still called the Han River. Seoul-3 almost deceits me into believing it is the real Seoul.

I trash the iced coffee I’ve just started on and curse the corndog I’ve eaten. The decision was not to taste anything ‘authentic’ and go straight where I needed to go to avoid triggers. But after all those years I am still weak. I start to run. My legs still hurt after yesterday, and my feet sweat because it’s too warm for this kind of boots. The backpack load digs with its sharp edges into my shoulder blades. At least the discomfort is distracting. I slow down and find my bearings a couple of blocks further. The delusion is fading. I notice the bumps of the underwater turbines amidst Han, which is not Han, but only an artificial canal, dug and filled with water that is circulated by those huge fans. It runs all through the city and afterwards simply ends; the water goes underground into the river’s twin where it is pushed backwards to the beginning. I’ve read all about its construction. All these buildings around me – mostly they aren’t even an exact replica. Maybe, just the few most noticeable. A general semblance is enough. After all Seoul-3 is not even in Korea. Because there is no more Korean peninsula. A few nuclear heads nudged the tectonic plates and now we’ve got only those names and versions to preserve some geographical continuity and national cohesion.

Surprisingly, in this panglomerated world I feel alien everywhere. You always said I could never blend in properly – that I had too much of a personality and not enough roots to settle anywhere. Well, the official records would not even say where I was born or brought up until the age of five, and all I remember is a blur of locations and a constant road. I truly believed, though, that I could find my home in Seoul with you. In the end, I cannot even remember your language, be it old or new one – all those classes, grammar drills and practice wiped away from my memory.

It’s a pretty long trip to the place I am here to visit, so having revised all the options I head for the bus stop. It’s another bite at my budget, but it will keep me away from more temptations. Like to go and see whether they’ve recreated your favourite ice-cream place.

The bus’s final stop is at what is considered the official border of the city. There are streets upon streets of concrete and wooden houses splaying onwards, dilapidated and askew, leaning into each other for support. Life spills out of these houses as I walk past them – the smell of cheap oil used too many times for frying; a concoction of gossip, domestic brawls and a rare radio; the washing hung out right out of the window. As an outsider, I attract much more attention here – they throw me suspicious looks. Who am I to them? Another unfortunate soul? A rival who came up to take some of their space here? A well-disguised spy for the government? I feel like all of that and none at the same time. My mission is my own, and yet its findings are going to go to the authorities. If I sold the contents of my backpack, I would probably get a small fortune for it, yet I still walk in mended clothes and have a fake official address. I could settle here and try to learn the language anew, though I would probably end up a recluse who had to point at things at the shop to buy them: old or new, Korean now seems incompatible with my brain on the neuron software level.

At first, it is just one or two graffiti on the walls – mere splashes of colour, test of aerosols, with little or rather abstract shape to them. Further on, real murals appear – political, angry, sarcastic, environmental. I pause at times, staring at this or that piece of street art. In none of the rumours I read, there was a picture, so I don’t know exactly what I am looking for. Only the effect.

I have almost reached the end of the city slum annex and feel desperate. A lot of my trips and reports in the previous years were based on intuition and still ended up successfully. Sometimes, rumours are just rumours. Or an exaggerated belief. Or a business plan of some gang to lure in tourists and rob them. A sour feeling of frustration, which I cannot explain, settles in my chest. I’ve been chasing ghosts all these years – ghosts that entertained people, ghosts that government and NGOs built their policies on. Wasn’t this one supposed to be just another one of them? Perhaps, slightly more sensational?

I lower the backpack on the ground and sit down against the nearest wall to rest. The wall behind me is pristinely clean, if you don’t count all the grime. Opposite me is a beautiful portrait of a ballerina caught mid-jump. I know I make it up, but the dancer’s face reminds me of you. If only this was the right mural. I close my eyes and let the dancer finish her jump in my mind’s eye, then continue to move onwards, alternating between jerky motions and smooth pas.

At first, I think I fell asleep mellowed by the heat of the day. But then I realise that the nudges at my back are happening for real. I turn around and see a faint image has appeared where before there was nothing. It’s nothing professional like the ballerina I have been admiring. It is more of an immature wiggly thing with broken perspective, looking like a Godzilla that ate a skyscraper and got a severe indigestion from that. Its outline has a ghostly shimmer to it. The warped Godzilla distorts even more as it clearly moves along the wall. And not just moves but transforms. The skyscraper inside her breaks through its silhouette, as if the monster had been turned inside out. The beast is now trapped within, still visible, together with the faces that appear in the skyscraper’s windows.

I rush to unpack my equipment – the recorder, the transcriber and the most precious thing – the old database from before panunification. With the right resolution, I might be able to run the people in that graffiti through face recognition. And hopefully the magnification will be enough to decipher what they are saying. Because they do, I am sure of this. This is the weirdest emanation, and the biggest one so far, of the past world. And the first one I am recording in Korea. The chance I’ll catch up your voice is meagre. After all, you died in Seoul-2, and most of this stuff comes from the era before.

Still, I crank the dials to the maximum, put on the goggles and the headphones. I can’t wait for the recording to finish to start listening. The wailing that substitutes statics when it comes to ghost channels almost deafens me this time. It takes a painful quarter of an hour to calibrate it and separate the echoes into different layers, then play them one by one. The Godzilla on the wall continues to go through its transformations coming to the front before being sucked into the skyscraper again to release its prisoners. I am tempted to look at the screen of the laptop, which is just behind my left shoulder. Could there be anyone I know?

Some ghosts tell stories of their life, some of their demise – there are warnings and messages of joy, each one an invitation to treasure life. Just broadcasting those can give humanity so much – hope and deterrent from destructive conflicts in the future. Suddenly I catch an incongruous word on one channel. Then another out-of-context word appears on the different layer. I switch between them to see what’s wrong. I swear I have not touched the dials. But the words are like a Morse code. I grab my phone and start jotting them down in the note app. I am doing that out of order, but the message transpires nonetheless. The Godzilla on the wall is back to the front – it lifts its head and roars. I can hear it in the headphones, but on the wall a zigzaggy bubble appears to show the effect.

Don’t bring the Samdo River to the surface.

What does it mean? Is it another warning to not kill too many people in the wars and economic division? Or to stop recreating rivers that disappeared with the continents’ merge? Are we really in danger of excavating the real River of Death?

The voice in one of the channels gets louder. It’s not yours. Some granny is talking.

The ghosts appreciate what you do. Not just the ghosts of people, but of cities and the earth strata. You are right to believe there are traces of your Soo in there. But be careful – digging too many of them through your recordings won’t lead to any good. You can’t bring her back from that assembly. What you will do is turn her into a beast – the terror of Samdo released.

“Who are you?”

I am the one who takes them across and brings them to the Ten Kings.

Sweat which has nothing to do with the heat runs down my spine. I feel dizzy. The self-preservation instinct begs me to jerk off the headphones and shut everything down. The old woman would be pleased.

“So, there is a way to bring Soo back?”

The Godzilla on the wall stomps and claws the space in front of it.

The only true way for her to return is Reincarnation. And her soul is not ready for that!

“Who says it? You? Are you tricking Soo in thinking she’s not ready?”

She’ll never come back to you the same she was.

Bits of Godzilla wall crumble to the ground, leaving a whole in its side.

You are a foreigner. You should have studied the world you are meddling with!

“Oh, I am a foreigner.” I get up from my equipment. The cable disconnects, but somehow I am sure I’ll be able to hear the grumpy woman anyway. “And the thing is there is no more ‘this place’ or ‘that place’ – it all got jumbled and relocated, and your Underworld might not be where you thought it is. It’s all messed up – the living and the dead, the load of victims who still want their voices heard, even from your Underworld. No, I get it – you can’t release them all: it will spike the population and cause even more problems.”

You’re a smart outsider.

“The thing is I am happy to do your bidding and broadcast their voices until you have the slots to reincarnate them. But I want Soo.”

I said I cannot bring her back – her soul needs healing. You were away – you did not see those horrors.

“You’re right. I was not there to save her or die with her. Let me help her heal. Let me at least talk to her. Occasionally.” I swallow a lump in my throat and brush away the tear that seems to burn through my cheek. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

You aren’t one of those sneaky bargainers from the west then.

The Godzilla on the wall pauses her self-destruction and peers at me with a yellow eye.

“I am not from the west. In fact, I am from nowhere, and thus I fit in this panworld the best.” I suddenly realised. “I am happy to deliver McDonald’s hamburgers to your Ten Kings. Just let me see Soo.”

Come to the Jongmyo Shrine tomorrow at sunset. If Soo is willing to come, she’ll find you there.

“The old site or the new?”

It is not funny to hear the graffiti Godzilla chuckle, and not just in my mind.

I’d love to see you dive deep into the ocean for this date, but unfortunately your death day is not in my books yet. The new one would do, oekuk-saram. Or shall I call you honhyeol – the mixed blood. After all, you had so many lives of such different origins.

“What do you mean?”

You want to uncover too many secrets in one day. For now you’ve got your deal, so go and fulfil your side of the promise.

The Godzilla is gone, and the equipment stops recording. I start to pack, thinking that I’ll try to find a better place to stay for this night. I need to shave and take a proper bath and find some cheap yet presentable clothes. I can’t look shabby when I see Soo. I can’t appear scruffy as a messenger of the Underworld – the grumpy woman would not appreciate.