The sound of a blaring horn rips me awake. My head is pounding and I seem paralyzed. I’m aware of a steady, throbbing pain behind my eyes. I can’t move my body, and my head seems detached from the rest of me. I turn my eyes towards the window to look around and see what is happening, but I only see lights and the seemingly indistinguishable forms of pedestrians on the sidewalks.

Where am I? The smell of stale cigarette smoke and car freshener, the feel of cheap upholstery and movement cause a slight flashback. A cab, I think. It must be. I can see the dim reflection of the driver in the windshield as the headlights of the oncoming vehicles briefly light up the interior of the car. Had I been sleeping? I seem to remember getting in to the car but it’s all so hazy and pale in my mind, like a photograph taken at the turn of the century.

“Where are you taking me?” I croak at the driver.

He looks at me in the rearview mirror, a kind of glare that causes momentary panic. Those eyes. He stares at me for a second and then returns to the road. Silence. Except for the dim and tinny sound of the radio, all I can hear is the engine.

“Excuse me!” I barely manage to say. Why do I feel so bad? My head is swimming in agony and I can’t seem to remember anything past the last few minutes. “Can you please tell me where we’re going?”

Nothing. I look out the window again. Things seem clearer now, but there’s still a weird haze, almost like there’s a filmy substance covering my eyes. I see a woman with a badly misshapen back struggling with something in her hands. Is it a child or an animal? A knife is in her hands and she’s slicing into the writhing creature. The scene blurs past and I see a group of men exiting a restaurant arm in arm, drunk and happy in the moment. I seem to remember eating at one of these places once, but the memory refuses to solidify and dissipates like vapor in the air.

Korea. The word floats through my consciousness like a distant echo. I look out the window once more and see the oddly written signs, and buildings piled together like a Lego project gone awry.

The flashback hits me all of sudden and I’m transported back in time. A moment, days, weeks, or months, I’m not sure. I remember exiting a plane, happy and excited to be here. Here? A woman is smiling at me as she stamps my passport and hands it back. The memory is painful, almost slow motion, and I realize that I’m in Korea and it all begins to click.

A conversation from an eternity ago enters my thoughts and I’m taken to a scene of dirty flowers, brown grass and sunshine. There are exercise chin-up bars glinting in the sunlight, but it all seems so surreal. A river and swimming pools are beside me as I walk down a path through a park. A friend, I can’t remember who, is telling me something, though the words sound strange and the memory is unclear.

“Did you hear? Some foreigners were kidnapped or something the other day.” He looks at me but I can’t see his face, only a mist where his face should be. “Their bodies were found this morning, badly mutilated and…Are you okay?”

“Please stop,” I barely manage to spit out the words at the driver. “I can manage from here”.

The man screams at me in a barely intelligible tongue and swerves suddenly to avoid a bus. Maybe he was screaming at the bus. I’m not sure. My body slumps sideways into the seat and I can’t seem to sit back up. I grope for the door but can’t seem to move. What’s happened? Why can’t I move my arms?

I suddenly realize that I’m tied up, though the suddenness of that realization makes me dizzy and ill. My hands and feet are bound by rope. I begin to sweat and I can feel the drops sliding down my forehead, stinging my eyes. My sweat rolls down my face and touches my lips. The salty taste of my own sweat is like tasting reality.

The sound of laughter drifts through my mind. I hear laughter and screaming, the sound of children entering my classroom. My classroom? I teach? It dawns on me that I don’t know what I do, exactly where I am, or what the hell is going on!

Lights flash through the car and I can see the reflection of buildings sliding past in the window. As the light from a streetlamp floats up the seat and out of the car I notice a trail of blood that seems to follow in a downward arc towards where I lay. My head is stuck to the seat and I can’t move anymore. A pool of coagulated blood has formed on the seat and plastered my head to the vinyl.

I pull my head upwards and the sound of it coming unglued makes my stomach retch. I struggle and finally manage to sit up, though the pain that tears through my skull causes me to black out. I can hear sounds increasing and decreasing in volume. Echoes and fragments of time that split through the moment like a flashback return me from the dead.

I can no longer speak. My eyes turn towards the world and I see a man with bandages wrapped around his legs and head. He is lying on the sidewalk and staring at nothing as people stream past him. His grotesquely mutilated hand is held out, begging for change. Beside him is a woman fighting with her husband. He brutally slams her against the wall, screaming at her and slapping her in the face. A police car goes by in the opposite direction, its siren on but in no hurry to do anything. Its blue and red lights pierce through my skull and hurt my eyes. I try to scream something, anything, but all that emerges from my lips is a groan and some drool that had been gathering in the corners of my mouth.

“Yeah, it happens once in awhile. Some poor foreigner bastard is walking down the wrong street late at night, and BANG! Sayonara, man!” I can still hear the voice but it fades with the laughter preceding it. “You think you’re getting into a cab, or something, and next thing you know you’re disemboweled, penniless, and dying on the sidewalk.”

“Help,” I manage to spit out.

The driver turns those malevolent eyes to the mirror once again and he starts to laugh. It’s a bad kind of laugh that loosens my bowels and causes my guts to cramp. I see the red glow of the cigarette lighter that briefly illuminates the drivers’ face. It’s a craggy face, with bags under the eyes and lines that tell his age. That face seems familiar.

“Get in, I know where you want to go.” The cab driver nods his head and flashes a toothy smile in my direction. I notice that someone else is already in the cab and look back at the driver. “It’s okay. I take him same place.” The memory is receding, fading into a gray maelstrom of thought and cognition.

Why is my stomach in so much pain? I could only sense a weird numbness emanating from my midsection a moment ago. Now it felt like a hot poker was twisting in and out, in and out. Blackness washes over me and I pass out again.

Where am I? My eyes seem glued shut and my head is pounding. I feel a slight movement underneath me, smell stale cigarettes and cheap… It all comes flooding painfully back and I struggle to open my eyes. My head had slumped forward so that my chin is resting against my chest. Slowly my eyes peel open and I’m staring down at my stomach. A groan escapes my lips and a scream, dry and hoarse comes out of my mouth. My whole body is filled with an unspeakable feeling of despair and overwhelming fear that consumes me.

My guts are spilled into my lap and the blood is everywhere.

I hear laughter, strange and slightly mad, coming from the driver. I glance up to see him looking at me once again through the rearview mirror. Those eyes. Why the eyes? And then I remember all of it.

I nodded to the driver that I understood and got into the back seat. I stole a glance at my traveling companion in the cab and noticed that one eye was gray, while the other one was brown. I thought it strange because I had never seen a blind eye before. He grinned at me and it seemed so unreal, so distinctly foul. All of a sudden the man had a knife in his hands and he quickly lunged toward the driver with a speed and savageness I wouldn’t have thought possible in a man of his age. The driver was dying in the front seat before he could scream, the knife having pierced his neck and severed his vocal chords.

The man elbowed me across the face before I could so much as move and then I felt it. A feeling of cold ice blasted through my guts. It both winded me and caused an explosion of pain to rip through my body. I could smell the man’s breath on me, and hear him breathing hard with the exertion of driving that blade in and out of me. He was staring at me, totally detached from reality. That was the last thing I remembered: those creepy eyes.

“I’m telling you, man. You can never be too careful in this town.” My buddy had this mischievous grin on his face. “If anyone, I mean anyone tried to fuck with me like that… Well, let’s just say they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

He was laughing, and I still couldn’t make out his face, and then I realized it was the driver laughing at me again. The driver. The man who murdered me in a strange land, far from home, for reasons I will never understand. And then me, sitting in the back, dying slowly, thinking of waking up from this nightmare, taking a shower and going to work.

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