Spinning (빙글빙글)

I'm in a taxi. In Busan (nee Pusan). It's almost eleven o'clock, but still traffic is bad on this Friday night in early August. I'm twenty-six. It's humid, and I want nothing more than to arrive at my hotel. The humidity is encroaching, stifling my breath, overheating me like a man clad in wool in the Sahara. Tiny fir needles are poking at my face. There's no air-conditioning in this taxi, and, Christ, the driver speaks in a dialect to which my ears are virgin.

Through unfamiliar streets we pass, stopping, starting, stopping again. I haven't eaten since nine a.m. Ramen. Some dried laver and a carrot. But I'm far from hungry. I keep fighting the urge to vomit. Sleep is what I crave. Tomorrow I'll probably go to the beach and find a place that serves good seafood. Clams, mussels, oysters: an orgy of salt-water shell fish. Right now, though, I want to rest my head against the window and hope the neon cityscape lulls me into unconsciousness.

I am awoken by the pleading voice of an angel. I cannot have been asleep for more than a few minutes, yet now the world seems brighter. My restless stomach is placid, as is my anxiety. It's cooler, too. A pop song that I can only surmise was released in the eighties blares out of the taxi's factory-installed speakers, and I am in love.

"Who sings this song?" I ask the driver.

"Huh? That's Nami! She was big," he informs me.

Nami. 빙글빙글. I make a mental note to look up the song and its singer when I reach my hotel. Surpise, surprise, I forget to. Instead, after checking in, I watch a melodramitic movie about teenage pregnancy on cable and fall asleep in the clothes I've worn all day.

Now, I remember.