lucyoncolorado

In which I stumbled into North Korea...

An emergency call brings us outside of Seoul to the DMZ where a group of 2012 Apocalypse believers has committed mass suicide. We fly an ambulance plane to a circle of bodies on a hillside. About a dozen young Japanese immigrant women, dressed in kimonos, have gutted themselves with swords- harakiri-style. Some are still alive, writhing around in a mess of blood and intestines.

Each emergency responder drives his or her own ambulance plane, a single-person ultra-light aircraft like a Pipistrel. We carry the dying or dead cult members in pods attached to each wing. When my two pods are both full, I fly to the nearest emergency room in the DMZ which happens to be in a subway-like network of tunnels. The passage is almost too narrow to navigate without clipping the wings of my plane.

I land safely, and several medics run over with stretchers to take the women from the pods, then they rush off down a tunnel before I have the chance to speak to them. This is my first trip ever to the DMZ, and I don’t know how to get out of the tunnel network. I can’t fly my plane backwards, and there isn’t enough space for me to turn it around. I take off on foot down the tunnel after the medics but I quickly find myself at a fork and must decide which way to turn. Holding up a wet finger to check for air flow, I choose the direction that I assume will lead me back above ground.

Soon enough I’m standing in the open air in a plane parking lot. Hundreds of Pipistrels and small Cesnas are packed side-by-side so densely that I must climb over wings and crawl between wheels to make it across the lot. After some time, I notice I’m no longer climbing over planes but instead climbing over giant Chinese dragon parade floats. Then after some more time, I’m climbing over F-16 and F-35 fighter jets.

Eventually I come to the end of the lot where I take a bridge over a ditch and then walk up a hill towards a shopping strip. There is a bakery directly in front of me with neon signs of Korean lettering selling sweet rice cakes with red bean paste. I’m completely confused about where I am, but I’m also very hungry so I decide to enter the shop, get a bite to eat and ask the clerk how to get back to Seoul.

As I get closer to the shopping strip, I notice that the buildings are dilapidated and the people shopping in them are older and less fashionable than the people you normally see shopping about in South Korea. I purchase a dessert and ask the clerk where we are. He tells me that I’m in Kaesong. I try not to reveal how shocked I am. I can feel the panic in my body and my mind races through my options, but I decide the most inconspicuous thing to do is to continue to sit and finish my sweet rice cake. It’s hard to swallow.

I leave the shopping strip and head back down the hill towards the bridge. I decide just to crawl back through the lot of fighter jets, Chinese dragons and single-person planes towards the Southern side of the DMZ, but before I even step off the bridge, a few North Korean military men point guns at me. I hold my hands up in the air and brace myself to be shot, but instead they put me in the back of a jeep and drive me to a dingy office in a concrete building overlooking a river. A North Korean woman sits behind a desk. She has a kind face, and I hope for a moment that she will be reasonable.

I explain that I’m an American medic living in Seoul and that I’ve stumbled across the border accidentally. I ask her if I can just walk back across the bridge; surely she can just phone the people on the other side and see that my story checks out? She smiles at me sympathetically and says, “You’re in pretty big trouble.”

I don’t have a passport or identification. They suspect that I’m a spy, and even if my story is true, I’ve already seen that they have hundreds of F-35s. No one in the world knows about this, so there is no way they are going to let me go home. I’ll be under house-arrest indefinitely. The kind-faced woman explains this to me very calmly, then she takes me by the hand and leads me to a house where I’m to live out the rest of my days with a North Korean family. They feed me a nice meal and send me to bed, but I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of the American hikers who stumbled into Iran several years ago and were detained for years. No one believed their story; we all wondered how they could’ve done something so idiotic.

I’m in bed watching the intense starlight flood in through the window when the son of the North Korean family with whom I’m lodged slips into my room. He’s wearing a black wool felt Alpine hat, workers trousers and shepherd’s snow boots, and he’s extremely good looking. He hands me a medic’s kit and some papers that explain that I’m a volunteer guest of the North Korean government with permission to travel the villages administering vaccinations. He explains that without a passport or a North Korean guide, these papers aren’t enough for me to cross the border or fool the authorities, but they will allow me to pass the streets and between towns. The trick is to be inconspicuous enough that no one asks further questions. Then he opens the window and wishes me luck.

I climb out the window and the first thing I notice is the darkness of the city and the brightness of the stars. Then, with my medic’s kit in one hand, I sneak from shadow to shadow unnoticed across the town until I make it back down to the river by dawn. The river is barricaded with barbed wire and armed soldiers in towers. I can see the DMZ on the other side. I walk confidently along the river walk with my medic’s kit and volunteer papers and no one stops me, but I notice that there is no way that I can get across the barricade. Eventually I come to a set of subway stairs, and because there is nowhere else to go without turning around and heading conspicuously back the way I came, I descend into the subway.

I wander around lost, constantly on the move so as to not draw attention to myself, but before long I realize that I’m never going to leave. It’s ridiculous even to try. I’m going to spend the rest of my life stuck in North Korea, and because I don’t have the courage or the wits to join a resistance group and defy the government like the good-looking son of my house-arrest family, I’ll probably end my life as a prisoner. I'm not resilient enough to spend a lifetime in wandering and hiding. I sit down and cry, full of despair and still shocked by how quickly an entire life can be destroyed.