On the next block, there are two more of the gwee shin, wandering side  by side, holding hands, gravitating towards some unknown destination like  metals to an invisible magnet. This is happening in other parts of the city;  the gwee shin have manifested en'masse throughout the Pusan, and are slowly  converging on a central point.

     It's late July, and the southern end of the Korean Peninsula is riding   the pounding force of an annual monsoon season. A blanket of filthy rain has  been descending on the metro city of Pusan for solid weeks. The continuous  pulsing flow of traffic through the streets now looks like a hell-bent  venice as the tires cut through ground water.  The rats have begun a mass  exodus out of the flooding open sewers in an effort to survive.

     Randy Ontario is watching the vermin's plight from the third story  window of the Yungi-Dong apartment.  He's been laid up since mid-May; rigged  into a full-body bracing traction setup, in the four room apartment's back  bedroom, after a viscous traffic accident on his autobike.  He'd broken damn  near everything, and afterward he found himself in an immoveable position,  with his head leaned mercifully towards the window overlooking the street.

     His roommates, and fellow English Teachers, Gus and Wendy Toronto,   Cincinnati Jones and G-bra Somewhere had been caring for him in his damaged  state, earnestly, for the first few weeks of his ordeal.  They'd even worked  out a schedule around their teaching hours, so that there'd  always be  someone there to keep an eye on him; and with the revolving cast of  characters who were drawn to the large and socially magnetic apartment;  American GI's from the US Army Base across the street, freaky circus  performers from the Blotto Hotel show, drifters who  who frequently flowed  through town, hip Buddhist monks looking for hash connections, Russian  Hostesses, prostitutes of various nationalities; Randy was never at a loss  when he needed someone to change his bedpan or empty his pissbottle, or  blend up his dinner and serve it with a straw ... or administer his 2 hour  interval high octane pain pills.  There was always somebody there, waiting  to give him his drugs ... for the first few weeks.

     But then, somewhere around the beginnings of the rainy season, possibly  when the ennui of storm season began to show it's face, the pills began to  disappear at an accelerated rate.  Someone had discovered that the gel  cap-cocktail of opiate derivatives, heart-rate regulating stimulants and  mind-numbing anti-inflammatory didn't descriminate between the healthy and  the infirm; hospital doctors had granted bottled parties to all in the form  of refillable prescriptions.

    In the first weeks after the discovery, Randy's two hour intervals held  up; and even as the first of the pills began getting filched by his  roommates and their friends, there was still always someone there to pop the  medicine into his mouth. Plus he had no contact with the prescription  bottles, so he never new the difference.  Every couple hours, a different,  blurry, but kind face would appear above him with what he needed to silence  his screaming body.  But then the faces began looking less kind, and more  twisted; warm eyes became googly, and caring smiles became twisted drug  addled grins.  He tried to voice the issue, but both sides were to far gone  on the reality altering drugs to make any sense of it.

     In the passing weeks, the quiet, nurturing atmosphere of the apartment  built momentum as a twenty-four hour, seven day-a-week party.   The muffled  jazz tones on the stereo outside in the living room began to warp into  droning acid rock ... and then throbbing electronic oblivion ... then punk  rock mania ... rasta-dub beats to infinity ... big-hair heavy metal on  Saturday nights; occasionally, he'd see a  wild party scene happening down  the hall, through the bedroom's open door; or a random couple would roll  around in a sexual embrace on the floor of his darkened room, moaning,  giggling; he could hear them talking about him, how it was okay to get down  on his floor, because he was on these great pills too, and because he'd was  out of it, and would never notice.

     He began to feel like a child, kept away from the longest adult party  ever; and then the days came more frequently that there were no blurry faces  hovering over his bedside or answering his barely managed calls, and he  began to feel hungry,   the merciful drug buzz was wearing off as he was  missing dosages more often.  His mind began to clear, as the needles of pain  began their march up his spine.

     All the while, he viewed the continuous outside rain through the window  like it was an artsy movie.  A movie about a robotic city carrying on under  at the bottom of the ocean.      In the apartment's main room, the party raged fearlessly on.  What had  promised to be another grey beer and soju drenched rainy season had blurred  into a utopian chemical orgy of sorts; of a magnitude not unlike other  indefinite narcotic roller coasters, where the participants had generous  access to renewable resources; where on any given night an entrant could  mingle with the a cross section of enthusiastic users, partiers, sexers,  speed gigglers, valium dancers, pleasure fuckers, dilaudid philosophers,  cherry-busted Korean first-time turn-ons, castaways on the magic joybus ride  to happyland.

     Gus and Wendy Toronto had been the primadonnas of the party for the  first week and a half; but the intensity had built up to such a crazy pitch,  ultimately wiping out any privacy in the apartment that Wendy had flipped  out on a crying jag, and Gus'd whisked her away on a long trip to Japan in  hopes of reclaiming their sanity.  On the way out the couple'd bid Jason and  G-bra to 'make sure Randy was okay," and then quickly made their way to the  airport.

     At the pharmacy where Jason had been taking the prescription bottles to  be refilled, first once a week, and then with increasing frequency as more  heads started arriving at the Yungi-Dong apartment, the pharmacist was  starting to look askance when he'd thrust the empty bottles towards him with  a lopsided grin on his face.  The pharmacist didn't offer any resistance as  the visits increased from once to twice a week; but after three weeks, when  Jason started showing up every other day, he started to balk.  Then there  was the day when he just plain refused to refill the multiple controlled  substances, and Jason Cincinnati brought in his girlfriend Seo-Min, with her  bloodshot bobbing eyes, to negotiate in Korean.  " It was okay if he didn't  want to refill the prescriptions," she argued, " but if he could only give  the bottles back, so they could fill them somewhere else.  Our friend is  suffering!", she managed to say with a straight face, which then broke into  laughter.  The Pharmacist began to berate them as filthy pigs in his native  tongue, and refused them the bottles, as he threatened calls to the  authorities.  Seo-Min's giggle died, as the gravity of their situation began  to dawn on her codeine laden mind.  She grabbed Jason's arm, and rushed him  out, begging him to stop as he began knocking the condom and toothbrush  racks from the pharmacy counter with the anger of a junkie who realizes he's  been cut off.

   That night, as the battle worn Pharmacist locked up his shop and hopped  on his scooter to drive home, he whisked past four separate wailing gwee  shin; all pale white naked female souls, all wailing with the spectral pain  of victim's debts long past due; but he didn't catch their vaporous shapes  passing through the hot rain for even a second;  his illusions shielded him  like a protected child; as far as he knew, he lived in an ordered universe;  a world governed properly by the laws of physics and society; where genomes,  periodic charts  and quadratic equations compose the fabric of his time and  space.

      Due to her heavy pharmaceutical intoxication, Seo-Min's illusions  didn't hold up as she began to see the  passing gwee shin as they walked  along the sidewalks of Pusan.  Her first sighting was two blocks down from  the pharmacy she and Jason had just fled.  It was nearly 9 pm as they  traversed the flooding rain swept street side in rubber boots and under an  umbrella.  Jason was rambling on angrily about how they had to try and pay  the pharmacist to give them the prescription bottles back, when her grip on  his arm constricted in an instant, to nail points of piercing pressure,  through his raincoat, his shirt, and into his arm.  As she'd casually  glanced at the faces of passer's by under their umbrellas, she's noticed the  first figure as a person without an umbrella, which then revealed itself to  be a shimmering dull apparition of colorless female nudity. The Korean  cultural mythology she'd absorbed throughout her life in Pusan began to race  through her consciousness. 'Gwee Shin!", were the first words to fall from  her trembling lips as the oblivious figure passed.  Her shocking dig into  Jason's arms brought him to a startled halt as she collapsed into his arms,  causing him to drop their umbrella to the ground.  Panicked, he dragged her  spasmodic body out of the rain and into the stairwell mezzanine of a nearby  building containing a coffee shop, PC room and a beer mart.

    Flash ahead two weeks.  Randy Ontario is still in traction; the pain of  his massive internal injuries has returned with bone crushing a clarity.   It's been three days since anybody fed him or removed his body wastes.  It's  been four days since anyone bothered to give him any of the remaining pain  medications.  He can feel that he's begun to develop bed sores, and he's  figured out the scenario concerning the misappropriation of his pills, he's  beginning to believe that his desperate cries for medication and his  nutritional and hygienic attention have forced his now drugged out  caretakers to flee the apartment out of guilt and general feelings of  disparity over his increasingly miserable situation.  It's as Randy Ontario  grits his teeth in a surge of throbbing pain that he spot's his first gwee  shin, passing by on the sidewalk across the street.  The sight of a naked  ghost of a woman floating down the other side of the rain swept sidewalk  brings a moment of forgetfulness to his intense pain, as he begins to figure  that he's on the verge of dying; he thinks he's seeing the onset of a spirit  world that he never before believed in.  He hears the miserable cacophonous  cry and matches it with the figure; and squeezes his eyes closed as the pain  returns and he prepares to pass to the other side; the one that seems to be  unfurling on the road below. 

(to be continued...)