The Road with Reasons

The Road with Reasons

Ahjin Shim

At last, Soo stopped his motorcycle near the Shell Tower in front of the police barricade. Never in his life had he felt more relieved to see the police. As he braked he thought, at least this way, I won’t die alone defenselessly. Probably due to lack of time, all the police had managed to mobilize were police cars. No sprinkler trucks or vehicles with 'wall' for crowd control. The motorcycle squealed violently, like the scream of a dying person, and Soo was thrown to the left side. The emergency lights, the sirens, and the noise from the bull horns turned the whole area into a mad frenzy. The Thing, which had been chasing Soo, froze. It halted all rolled up like a giant pinwheel candy.

The police were very tense in the face of this phenomenon, which they couldn’t even determine whether to be a man-made or a natural disaster. Two policemen approached, training guns at Soo, and handcuffed him. The crowd quickly gathered around and began taking pictures of Soo and the Thing with their smart phones. Even forgetting to protest against being handcuffed, Soo gazed at the Thing which had followed him for such a long distance. The peeled off pavement resembling a rolled up carpet, alongside the Cheonggye creek, towered behind the toppled motorcycle.

The news about Soo spread quickly throughout the nation via cell phones and the internet. The police departments of the South Gate, Jongno, and Hyehwa districts began a joint investigation. The starting point was around Kosanja Bridge. About 9 P.M. on Sunday, the pavement alongside the Cheonggye creek peeled off and rolled forward and followed Soo on his motorcycle. Soo came to realize what was happening as he was passing the Wang Shim Ri district.

“At first, I didn’t hear anything. The muffler of my motorcycle is terribly loud.”

Soo saw a few people rollerblading on the sidewalks near the poorly lit closed market area. He slowed down because he knew sometimes skateboarders or rollerblade riders spill out onto the road. That’s when he sensed something and turned around to see this huge millstone-like thing right behind him. Soo thought it was going to roll right over him so he sped up. But the Thing kept pace and scared the devil out of him. It was around the East Gate when he realized that the Thing moved at the same speed as he was traveling. Soo didn’t stop for fear that he might get flattened by the thing if he did.

“The odd thing was I was the only one on the road.”

Soo was still trembling as he remembered. When the police checked into it with CC TV, it was true. Granted it was Sunday night so traffic was light, during the 15 minutes or so when this incident took place, there was absolutely no west bound traffic on Cheonggye creek Road. There was, however, some east bound traffic and there were pedestrians here and there on the sidewalk. The police response was initiated by a call made by one of the witnesses from the sidewalk. The police made a few attempts to intercept Soo’s progress but failed until they eventually formed a blockade at the Sejong-daero Entrance area. Soo told the police that he, too, had tried to contact the police but had dropped his phone because he was too rattled. The police retrieved a broken cell phone near the rows of fish tanks in the closed market area. It was where Soo said he had dropped it.

Soo became even more anxious after losing his phone. While vacillating over whether to stop or not, he tore through the plastic barriers blocking cars for the Weekend Area. The Cheonggye creek near Gwangtong Bridge area turned into a chaotic mess. Many got hurt from bouncing rocks from the torn pavement. Fortunately, the rolled up pavement stayed on course, only following Soo.

Soo seemed a bit perturbed when he was asked why he didn’t think of veering off to one bridge among lots of bridges over the Cheonggye creek.

“If I had attempted to cross Nare Bridge or Soo Pyo Bridge, it would have collapsed due to the heavy weight of the Thing. I considered turning left too but there was oncoming traffic on opposite site. Anyway, the Thing was too close behind me.”

What Soo said made sense. The Thing was a colossal concrete mass, almost 50 meters in diameter so one couldn’t even begin to imagine how heavy it was.

The whole nation was abuzz over this unprecedented event. The police began looking into how many misdemeanor charges they could issue against Soo. However, none of the traffic monitoring cameras captured Soo ignoring the traffic lights or the speed limits. Even if he had violated those laws, considering the perilous circumstance he was in, they couldn’t accuse him of a major offense. The loud muffler, which had prevented him from hearing the noise of the road tearing off, when they measured it, it didn’t exceed 80 decibel points so they couldn’t charge him for a noise violation either. Could he have been riding recklessly since he failed to notice what was going on around him? Soo replied, “Who looks behind all the time while riding a motorcycle?”

Cheonggye creek Road, claimed to be the pride of Seoul and the oasis for the citizens, exposed its inner part like the flesh of a slaughtered carcass. People couldn’t believe that the ground could peel like the skin of a fruit. The buried underground steel rods and sewage tunnels had been exposed. The road from the Majang to Kwanghwa district was blocked off. Since the traffic had to be detoured, the major roads in the heart of Seoul suffered from severe congestion. Within a day, the merchants and the citizens in the affected area began complaining vociferously. The Ministry of Transportation and Construction, the Ministry of Land and Maritime Affairs, and other scientific institutes all launched researches on this so called “land mass” or “rock mass,” but beside the obvious fact that the land had rolled up, they couldn’t come up with any new findings.

The first group which raised its voice was the religious people. Taking this occurrence as the sign for what they had been waiting for, the imminent Judgment Day, they looked expectant. They claimed that Heaven no longer would tolerate the present situation in which people pursue development single-mindedly while forsaking humanity. Environmental organizations also chimed in. They accused the present government’s policy of constructing visually striking and impressive structures while ignoring their effects on ecology, causing this disaster to happen. They dressed in green and held a rally at the site of the incident. A group of young artists released a statement, inspired by the rolled up road, which reminded them of a snail’s shell. An organization which researched the history of Cheonggye creek demanded a special grant to study the hidden secrets of the region. A shaman organization asserted that the wrath of Queen Sinduk’s spirit, which had been hovering around Gwangtong Bridge, was the cause of this phenomenon and called for a nationwide sacrificial rite.

There was no shortage of people who wanted to have their say. Any individual or group which believed they had something to do with the event released their statements. Finally, the politicians entered the picture. The private indiscretions of the heads of the concerned ministries were exposed by the media and castigated. The ruling and the opposing parties claimed the other responsible for the incident. The overwhelming sentiment was that the established system should find someone to pay. But there were few who were weak and dopy enough to be a scapegoat.

Fingers began to point to Soo.

Although Soo was initially found not guilty and released, he was summoned back to the police station and the court for further interviews and investigation. Cheonggye creek and his name became the most searched words on the internet.

Age 28, residence in Majang District, an employee at a mannequin wholesale company in Shinpyeonghwa market, the place of birth…, hobby…, love interest…

Many of Soo’s acquaintances made comments about him on the internet. When the information about his penchant for visiting bookstores despite being just a humble market worker became known, many malicious bloggers built conspiracy theories. The consensus was that there was something fishy about Soo. His rental home became an issue. The area was traditionally known for a beef market. According to one theory, there were spots where the slaughtered cows’ grudge was concentrated and three of those spots happened to overlap at Soo’s house. Someone attempted to draw a connection to a spooky folklore tale from his hometown, The Talking Forest. Some cited the significance of Soo once touching the statue of Jun Taeil, an anti-government protester who died by self-immolation, located on the Willow Bridge. Another even advanced the theory that Soo was a North Korea sympathizer. Soo’s employer, the mannequin store owner, had a hard time fielding questions from the throng of reporters. One avant-garde artist, saying she suddenly became inspired about naked existence, stood up at Cheonggye Square disguised as a mannequin.

Soo’s everyday life was put under the microscope. He had worked as a clerk for a series of stores in the East Gate Market. He once worked for a shoe wholesale store, and also worked for a tool shop. He didn’t have professional expertise and worked in sales or delivery. Sometimes he stopped by a coffee shop there were hookers. Since he left his hometown at eighteen, he lived in rental homes in the Majang District and had worked for ten and some years but all he had was less than two million won in his Installment Savings Account for Home Buying. He once lent some money to some friends and never got it back. He was laid off by a tile store, where he had had the longest stint, without being paid for a few months worth of past due wages. His present life wasn’t much better than the one ten years ago. Nothing extraordinary had been detected in the way he lived his life. Soo’s life was so ordinary that it seemed almost unreal. Yet the investigation on Soo continued.

In the mean time, the colossal mass remained at Cheonggye Square. Some insisted that it should be cleaned up immediately and others asserted that it should be left there as a monument to this historic event. So, the future of the Thing was up in the air. Traffic conditions were still horrible and many citizens in the area complained more. The leadership ability of the authority was questioned and accusations about who was ruining the country circled around cyber space. Everyone was getting angrier and more frustrated.

One fact that was viewed as odd was that Soo had decided to go, of all places, to Kyobo Bookstore at that exact time by the Cheonggye creek Road. Soo’s explanation was quite simple. “They have many books there.” But that reason was much too simple to be accepted. Among the Soo accusers, one especially fervent one pulled out words from the list of books Soo had purchased and displayed: desire, admiration, wind, standstill, contradiction, new, opportunity, eternity…. Trials were held multiple times. Contrary to the first verdict which was not guilty, applying the Criminal Law articles 87 and 115, Soo was convicted of treason and sedition for committing an offense against the safety of the state. The public defender, who had assured Soo that he had a fighting chance, completely disappeared after the verdict.

Soo got incarcerated. He wondered if he was in jail because he had said the wrong thing. Instead of just saying, “They have many books,” he mighy have to add more like, “I went out for some fresh air.” Maybe, he thought, he visited the bookstore too often and that was the problem. But he didn’t say anything about the female clerk there whom he was secretly in love with. He didn’t want her picture uploaded on the internet.

Soo felt sad and gloomy. He couldn’t say that he ever had a great life but he did all he could. He couldn’t understand why this was happening to him. Why didn’t the Thing follow other motorcycles like Harley Davidsons? Why did it happen around Cheonggye creek instead of Han River? He hadn’t even enjoyed a leisurely date around the area.

He thought about that night. While being chased by the rolling pavement, he remembered looking up to see the crescent moon. Over the dark buildings which harbored tiring, loathsome daily struggles, there was the glint moon. While being under such a desperate circumstance why did he even look above? The sliver of the moon had felt unfamiliar and cold to him like the cold floor he was sitting on.

The moment Soo remembered the moon, which had resembled an eyebrow, strange things began to happen in various places in Seoul. The roads began to rip open and roll forward. From behind the motorcycle which was delivering fabric material, the ambulance which was taking a patient to the hospital, a sedan with the radio turned up way high, the pizza delivery motorcycle, the roads ripped open and rolled after them. Just like the way the outer layer of scallion peel when you slice them on end, the roads rolled up. The exact same duration as with Soo’s case on Cheonggye creek Road, many roads throughout the nation rolled up. Panic engulfed the entire nation. The people who had had so much to say and blame to assess when it happened to just one person, Soo, all became mum because they knew that the road they were walking on or driving on could suddenly roll up from behind.

It goes without saying, Soo declared not guilty and released.