Kidnapped
by John Haggerty
John Haggerty’s “Kidnapped” is the winner of the 2020 NO CONTEST. Read our interview with the author below the story.
The proximal cause of Linda’s kidnapping was her presence, partially buried in sand, on Ocean Beach at the western edge of San Francisco on the night that a North Korean submarine emerged from the dark and frigid waters of the Pacific.
“I guess it wasn’t even really a kidnapping,” she would say when relating the story. “They are really very nice people. At least the kidnapping ones are.”
The distal causes of her kidnapping are many and varied:
A childhood in Orlando, Florida, its wide, pedestrian-resistant streets, its glut of ersatz fiberglass-and-concrete pleasure palaces, the oceans of peevish tourist families who had somehow imagined that this vacation would be much more fulfilling and bonding than it had turned out to be.
The recent metamorphosis of her mother’s annoying boyfriend Dan into her controlling and frightening stepfather Dan, who, on his days off from the car rental counter, wore t-shirts from branches of the military in which he had never served.
The growing feeling in Linda that Orlando was a miniature replica of America—an attractive veneer of happiness pasted over a murky malarial swamp of greed, racism, and delusion.
The summer savings from her fast-food job that, in its magnitude, appeared to be not a sum of money, but a threshold to a new and radical way of living, one much more aligned with the truth.
A Greyhound bus ticket to San Francisco, which exhausted itself at approximately the same time as the North American continent and many of her remaining illusions.
The cold and fog of San Francisco, where she wandered aimlessly through the streets, shivering and wondering why she had ever associated California with sunshine and palm trees.
Her eventual residence in a youth hostel that turned out not to be a youth hostel, but rather an illegal squat—this insight being delivered in the form of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department splintering the front door with a battering ram, forcing her to leap from a rear window and conceal herself in a garbage can amidst piles of spoiling vegetables and used diapers.
The hard truth that her shaved head was not, in fact, an attack on the oppressive patriarchal gender expectations forced on women, but an attempt to control a bad case of head lice.
The eventual departure of the sheriffs, followed by her egress from the can, and a despairing trek down to the beach, the fog so thick that the city behind her was just a gray glow, like the entire history of humankind fading into obscurity behind her.
The rough, implacable waves of the Pacific Ocean, the merciless wind that blew off it, and her attempts to find some measure of warmth and comfort by burying herself in sand.
Among the facts that the Internet could tell Linda should she ever be inclined to ask it:
North Korea is a darkness visible from outer space.
The Korean Central News Agency states that current leader Kim Jong-un could drive at the age of three and was a competitive sailor at nine.
U.S. General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, said, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too."
Kim Jong-un’s older brother, Kim Jong-nam, lost his place in the line of succession when he was discovered with a forged Japanese passport trying to enter Tokyo Disneyland.
During the Korean War, the United States stopped bombing Pyongyang because there was nothing left to destroy.
Disneyland is the happiest place on earth.
Kim Jong-nam died of acute nerve agent intoxication in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
General Curtis LeMay: “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—twenty percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?”
Kim Jong-un caused one of his uncles to be ripped apart by starving dogs.
During the 1968 U.S. presidential campaign, Curtis LeMay joined George Wallace on the American Independent Party ticket, running on an explicitly segregationist platform.
In the Chinese city of Dandong, tourists pay 70 yuan to be taken to the North Korean border where they can gawk at the ragged and starving people just across the Yalu River.
Rap superstar and Kardashian in-law Kanye West appears on the 2020 California ballot as the vice-presidential candidate of the American Independent Party.
Kim Jong-un retains the full support of former NBA rebounding phenom, Dennis Rodman.
“I must have fallen asleep,” Linda says, on the subject of her encounter, “because when I woke up, they were there.” A huge gray submarine loomed before her in the surf, fading in and out of the fog. A spotlight stabbed out of the conning tower, pinning her to the beach like a butterfly in a display case, and soon she was surrounded by North Koreans.
There were about twenty of them, men and women. The men were dressed in crisp white uniforms. The women wore the traditional Joseon-ot, short white blouses over billowy, vibrantly-colored silk dresses. They regarded her silently for a few moments, then the captain raised his hand and snapped his fingers. A crewman handed him an electric guitar.
“Dick Dale,” he said in a flat, accentless voice. “Surf music pioneer.” He held the guitar totemically out in front of his chest. “Fender Jaguar, seafoam green.” He did a quick, grating pick slide down the low E string and launched into a half-speed version of a song that Linda somehow knew was the classic instrumental, “Let’s Go Trippin’ ”. The men stood at rigid attention, while the women performed dreamy go-go dancer moves, throwing their arms in the air and gyrating their hips.
The song ended, and a long silence ensued. Finally, in his precise English, the captain said, “If you want to know the taste of a pear, eat the pear. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.” He bowed, and the Koreans turned and moved back toward the submarine. They disappeared into the mist, as if vaporized, as if sacrificed for freedom, as if their grandparents were incinerated in the womb, as if they could never have existed at all.
John Haggerty’s work has appeared in dozens of magazines such as Carolina Quarterly, CRAFT Literary, Indiana Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He is the founding editor of the Forge Literary Magazine.
An Interview with John Haggerty
Can you tell us a little bit about the source-point of inspiration for this piece — what drew you to incorporating these specific “factoids” into a larger narrative?
I originally wrote this for my writer's group. It was part of a forced-march exercise where you pledge to write a certain number of flashes over the space of a weekend. As I recall, this was the last one I wrote, and I was running out of gas. It originally consisted of just the fictional parts—a young woman travels from Orlando to San Francisco and has...well I guess you could describe it as an experience of some sort. It was quite odd, and I didn't really know what to do with it at the time. My first reaction was that it was just one of those failures that comes from authorial desperation and inspirational exhaustion, so I put it away and called it a day.
There was something oddly compelling about it, though, and I kept coming back to it. I started thinking about the real-life surreality that is North Korea and the fraught nature of our relationship to it. This in turn led to some googling, and the more I found out there, the more sense my original piece made.
The tie-ins between Orlando, the Disney empire and North Korea—the whole magic kingdom vibe—are things that occurred to me only after I started assembling my factoids, but I realized that that was the conceptual framework of the story. Curtis LeMay, of course, was an absolute gold mine—that guy was completely fucking insane. And our actions in during the Korean war, which were, objectively, genocidal war crimes...well they speak for themselves. We reduced an entire country to rubble, anointed ourselves the heroes of the affair and walked briskly away. The whole thing is very disturbing and strange.
It really pointed out to me how truly subjective our world is. So much of what we believe to be true is knowledge that we have passively received, unexamined bits and pieces of things that are taken at face value and dubbed common knowledge. Disneyland is the happiest place on earth. North Korea is a worker's paradise. America is a noble force for democracy and freedom. Are any of those statements more believable than that the crew of a North Korean submarine might be inspired to stage an impromptu surf music revue? Is having a relative torn apart by dogs more or less barbaric than systematically bombing every single structure in a country into dust?
Anyway, to answer the original question, no, there was no underlying plan. I wrote something that I didn't understand, and then, somehow, found a way to get it to make sense to me. I wish things were different, that I could say that I knew exactly where I was going and what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, the truth is much more humiliating than that. As the truth often is.
Tell us a little bit about your writing process these days — has anything changed under quarantine? How have you found inspiration?
I find this topic embarrassing because my "process," if it can be dignified with such a word, always feels a little bit makeshift and shoddy to me. I read somewhere that Thomas Mann would go into his office at 8:30 in the morning, Monday through Friday, and emerge at the stroke of 5 with 2,000 words of perfect prose. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but the idea that there are people out there who write like this fills me with horror and dread.
My muse is not nearly as industrious and Germanic. I envision her as a narcoleptic chain-smoker who rouses herself at infrequent and unpredictable moments to wheeze random thoughts at me through the wall. This means that I spend most of my time not writing, waiting for her to gather the breath and energy to give me something to work with.
I've tried doing things differently. There have been periods when I have resolved to straighten up and be a Mann, to crush my self-destructive laziness with the hammer of my implacable will, but it has never worked out. Whenever I try it, I get bad, abortive pieces that have absolutely no life to them, as if the muse is saying, "Fine, take it. But don't expect me to work on it anymore."
It took me years, but I've made my peace with this. I increasingly see those long periods of non-writing where I feel useless and unproductive as an integral part of how I work. I know that this is a common dodge that writers foist onto their partners ("Honey, you know that watching 12 consecutive hours of ant-farm videos is an integral part of my creative process...") but I really think it's true. Somehow, something is happening there, even if I have absolutely no access to it until it's finished.
At any rate, one would think that a widespread economic lockdown would be ideal for me—nothing but time to sit around and wait. Somehow, though, the general agitation and uncertainty made things even worse. My muse seems to have spent most of the initial quarantine days dozing and hacking up unproductive bits of her tarry lungs. I feel like I've only recently been able to get back to the conditions under which I work (again, if you can dignify it with that word) the best.
What have you been reading lately, and what writing have you been particularly struck by?
I really like stylish writing. There's something about someone who can write sentences with rhythm and verve that make me sit up and take notice. Unfortunately for me, it seems that the current fashion is to write as simply and transparently as possible. That's fine, of course. It has its place, and can be very effective in the right hands. But when a writer can match the emotional content of a scene with striking and resonant prose, it makes things work so much better.
Imagine then, my excitement to come across Ocean Vuong's On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. The first thing I thought was, man, this person can really write! But good writing in itself only takes you so far. Beyond that On Earth is incredibly brave and honest. I am in awe of authors who can stand there with their souls completely bare, and that is the feeling I get from this book. I hope one day to be able to write with that kind of courage and integrity. It's the best book I've read in a while.
During a lockdown-induced binge of thrillers, I happened on Tana French, who is one of those wonderful writers who seem to be able to do everything—great plot, great characters, and her writing is excellent. It's a little bit sad that, because she writes about murder investigations, that she is classified as a genre writer. She is so much more than that.
I just finished the last book in Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy. Mantel is a brilliant write, and those three books are an incredible body of work all by themselves.I am amazed by her endurance and the consistent excellence that she could bring to such a long work. The final scene in Bring Up the Bodies is some of the best writing I've read anywhere.
Finally, I always have to put in a plug for Edith Wharton. Why isn't she on the short list of the best American writers? She was so smart, so sharply observant, and she was really funny. She's like Jane Austen with a mean streak. The Age of Innocence is a masterpiece.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve been working on currently — what’s been keeping you busy, or what you hope to make progress on soon?
I just finished a novel, which is a straight-up thriller. I guess I wanted to see if I was like Graham Greene, if I could move smoothly between literary fiction and potboilers. I think it turned out reasonably well, but I'm not sure if I have another one in me. I'm kind of a weird writer, and by the end of this one I felt a little bit hemmed in by the strictures of the genre. I guess I'm not the writer Tana French is. Or Graham Greene for that matter.
At any rate, now I'm back to my roots. Really good literary writing has a depth and beauty that I have been able to find nowhere else. Sadly, I also sometime feel that serious writing is a dying art. But that's OK. Keep writing, writers. I will be here to read it.
