Tuesday morning. Actually, Monday night. That’s when he made the decision to withdraw. He would slip out of his routine quietly, without fanfare. No announcement, no notice; nothing to call attention to his disappearance from the ether, the netherworld of the internet.
He realized his absence might be noticed by a few people who read his disjointed, stream-of-consciousness online blather; but, he reasoned, if they became concerned about him, they would contact him and he would reassure them he was safe and well.
He did not anticipate Tuesday morning’s frightful dislocations that would snare the world’s attention, diverting it away from his reflections or, rather, their absence.
The North Korean missile crisis drew the scrutiny of every media outlet and virtually every human being on the planet who had access to news of the country’s bellicose threats. He paid the news little heed. Instead, he focused his attention on his writing, a collection of words no one would read for a very long time.
The crisis lasted more than six months. North Korea’s missile test firings and subsequent nuclear detonations occurred almost daily, met by universal condemnation and threats from around the world. World governments responded to antagonistic sabre-rattling with menacing promises of their own, asserting they would use “any and all means at our disposal” to put an end to the possibility of nuclear attack by a deranged dictator. That defiant posturing—the threat of preemptive nuclear first-strike—was hollow, and the North Koreans knew it. And, so, they rattled their own sabres and danced to their own tunes of bravado, taunting the world with threats of a serpent’s strike.
Finally, though, the consortium of world powers listened and reacted with fear long enough to take bold action. Within two minutes of the dictator’s assassination by a missile-equipped low-flying drone and the simultaneous low-level nuclear strike in a desolate region of the country, the North Koreans knew the rest of the world was actually prepared to release a barrage of nuclear weapons on the state, guaranteeing instant and utter destruction. Behind the scenes, threats against the peninsula were so clearly articulated that the remnants of the dictator’s regime quietly but completely acquiesced. The crisis was over. The guaranteed dismantling of the regime’s nuclear arsenal would take months. During those intervening months, though, eighty-six nuclear warheads carried on thirty-five ocean-going vessels patrolling off the coast of the country assured compliance.
While the crisis was in full swing, he continued to write, but no one else read what he wrote. If anyone noticed his absence, no one mentioned it; people were so enmeshed in the crisis that nothing he might have said would have been sufficient to draw their attention.
Six months without “speaking” to the world was a new experience for Gunther Langley Positruska. He had been writing for forty years and, for the past ten, had been expressing his odd assortment of ruminations online for the world to see. His small audience and their rare comments had sustained him. Without that feedback, he sank into an old but familiar depression, one of his own making.
When Gunther finally began reading the papers and watching television news again, he felt a sense of déjà vu about the ongoing global nuclear crisis. It felt to him like something he had lived through before; not an imaginary experience, but something real, a substantive incident replete with visceral fears for the survival of humanity. The assassination and muscular display of nuclear readiness by a fierce band of angry nations finally brought it home to him. He knew where the sense that he’d been through it all before came from.
Inside a fireproof lockbox in his closet, a neatly organized cache of one terrabyte thumb drives prevented Gunther’s thoughts from disappearing. They might escape his brain, never again to be remembered, but if he had recorded them on his blog, they would be cataloged among his collection of thumb drives. When he finally decided he may have written about a scenario like the one that had just played out, he began searching. When I say his files were cataloged, I don’t mean cataloged in an organized way, making finding a specific piece of information easy. No, they were organized chronologically, so finding a specific article or post required either knowing its date of production or conducting a painstaking search of every drive, in order.
That’s how Gunther found it, searching every drive, trying various key words to find files that would trigger real memory, instead of the vaporous fog that enshrouded something familiar about the global terror of annihilation.
That’s how he discovered he had written—seven years earlier—about the events of that six-month span, exactly as they happened. Even a record of the assassination by drone and the concurrent nuclear detonation hid in Gunther’s odd conglomeration of fact and fiction, an emotional spillway leavened by stark, unemotional reason and logic unfettered with feeling.
After the stand-down, Gunther began telling people about what he had written seven years before, but almost no one had any interest in premonitions from an old unknown writer who didn’t quite understand how they came to be, anyway.
The one person who expressed an interest in what he said about his fiction-that-became-fact was a Russian scholar of Asia, a highly-regarded specialist in Korean studies. Andrei Kamakordakov studied at Leningrad State University and later attended Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung University. He then taught Korean history and language in Leningrad before accepting a teaching position in South Korea.
Kamakordakov read Gunther’s retelling of his earlier Korean story with fascination. He realized, of course, that Gunther could have been fabricating the story and that his supposedly old writing could have been produced after the recent crisis. But some of the references in the older story suggested otherwise. For example, Gunther had written about the allied nuclear strike of an abandoned city, Chonshung, in Sinhung Province. Four years after Gunther’s post, the North Koreans had abandoned that city; a fact virtually unknown outside of Korean scholars. All the recent literature continued to refer to Chonshung as if it still existed. How might Gunther have known about its abandonment, Kamakordakov wondered? There were other such clues that Gunther’s writing represented an authentic premonition about North Korea. Kamakordakov was interested to know whether there were others.
Kamakordakov initiated an email exchange with Gunther, inquiring about other, later writings about North Korea. Gunther responded that he did not know; he would have to check.
And he did. He discovered that, four years later, he wrote about the reunification of the two Koreas. In Gunther’s writing, the reunification began, in earnest, twenty-six months after the assassination. He wrote that there were few doubts that reunification would be difficult, but almost no one anticipated the scope and breadth of the problem.
Gunther’s writing suggested an almost cataclysmic clash of cultures. North Koreans had virtually no exposure to critical thinking. Their skills were, by a large, limited to farming; even those skills were relics of a time when farm machinery was virtually unknown, so adapting to a new era in which productivity was based, in large part, on efficient use of highly sophisticated equipment, was mightily difficult for the North Koreans.
As he read the old writings, Kamakordakov became concerned that the polite generosity of the South Koreans could turn, if reunification became a reality, to resentment and, then, something far worse.
Kamakordakov read Gunther’s manuscripts and worried. He worried that Gunther’s words might accurately foretell of an impending genocide unequaled in modern history. And Kamakordakov wondered how that—not the story, but the need to tell—it might be averted.
After forty-eight consecutive hours of assessment, Kamakordakov reached a conclusion about how to avoid that catastrophe. As a sensitive, honorable, decent man, Kamakordakov hated himself for conceiving of the only solution that seemed possible. Gunther did not deserve to be repaid for his premonitions in such a way, but what was the alternative?
[Some of what I’ve written here could, if extracted properly and pared down to proper length, serve well as a book “blurb,” the snare that gets people to buy the book. But this is not the whole story by any means. The story actually begins when Gunther Langley Positruska is a college sophomore. His erratic and troubling history would be revealed in the telling of this story and, frankly, I’m quite interested to know more about that history and how he came to, seemingly, foretell future events. I think I know, but it’s only an inkling at this point. If I get energetic, I might write the whole story; or I might not. I am coming to the inescapable conclusion that I must have adult attention deficit disorder; I can’t seem to be capable of focusing for the long-haul.]
