In Korea I began to live my desires intensely. I drank too much, I ate too much, I whored around too much. After I met M, I was filled with a semi-demented desire for her.

One of my students in Korea remarked that, in comparison to the quiet, ordered streets of Europe, Seoul must, at first, seem like a kind of hell. She had travelled to Europe and liked it. But she had missed the chaos of Seoul.

Night comes, and the city fills with neon. An old woman chopped onions into irregular lumps and then fired them on to a hot pan in the middle of our table. With silver chopsticks we picked slivers of garlic and dropped them into the pan, watched them melt, and then we tossed in red peppers. The old woman held strips of meat up in the air with a tongs and cut the meat into smaller strips with a scissors. Pork fat sizzled in the pan; we picked out the cooked meat, dipped our pieces into bowls of hot sauce, then placed the meat on a leaf that was laid out flat in the palm of our free hand; we added rice and folded the leaf over, making a ball. The ball went into our mouths in one, and we chewed it down. The sauce was fiery; we washed the whole thing down with Soju. Soju is a strong, clear alcohol made from rice. It only costs a dollar a bottle.

Large cars cannoned down laneways designed for two or three walking men. The persimmon tree had shed its skin, leaving orange globules like lanterns hanging from bare branches.

At night, everything is possible in Seoul. We left the restaurant and wandered down past the ancient gate of the old city and we heard the screams before we arrived in the open square where a black American soldier stood among a crowd of people and challenged all comers to a fight.

We watched him take on three Koreans at once. He destroyed them, left them curled up in balls of pain while he prowled the edges of the circle the crowd had made around him, begging for someone else to step in and face him.

We went into a pub and ordered beer. A Korean girl came over to us and gave me her phone number.

“Ring me later tonight.”

“She’s a prostitute.”

“She’s not. The prostitutes don’t come to this part of town.”

Step out of a building and recoil from the hot blast of the midday sun. The city smells of street traders and sewers. There is a great deal of music, even Christian bands that play all day long in the heat, and the homeless hover around them. There are long horizontal mirrors on many of the street corners; lines of people fix their hair in unison.

There are portrait junkies everywhere. Couples, groups of schoolgirls, older men with perfectly sculpted hair line up outside curtained booths. Flashes come from behind the curtain. The ground around the machine is littered with the pictures of couples and friends, illicit lovers, and lonely old men. M loved these places. Our first six or seven dates involved, at some stage, a photo booth. I still have some of these pictures.

The city was empty and cool in the early mornings. The walk from my apartment to the school where I worked took me past an array of metal workshops. Flakes of orange light were spewed up into the morning air. And the smell of metal.

I dreamt that a great flood came to the city. We all took to the tops of high buildings. Wooden doors of different bright colours became our rafts. The broken facade of the city, its dirty streets, its neon thicket, its pulsing crowds, all disappeared, and the uniformity of a blue chrome sea filled us with calm. No one was frightened or worried.

I dove off my door. I shot down deep into a watery silence. I spotted a reef of shining gold coins; I clutched handfuls of the coins and kicked my legs as I swam up the many floors of submerged skyscrapers. I left a trail of spilled and sinking coins in my wake.

Slowly the water began to drain away and we sank down into the streets again. The people lay wet and limp in the streets, and then we got up and tried to find our way home.

I lived in a love motel for my first few weeks in Seoul. My school assured me it was a temporary inconvenience. The love motel had throngs of call girls and hookers spilling out of every room. There were picture cards outside the love motel every evening. The front step of every building on my narrow lane was decorated with embossed pictures of the girls of Yeoung-Deoung-Po. The cards were laid out in a perfect geometric square, a uniform distance between each card.

In the morning, I would leave for school early. Classes began at 6 a.m., and I was up and gone by twenty to. One morning as I left the love motel I saw one of the fish men collect up one of the cards and kiss it tenderly. When he became aware of me, he put the card back down on the step and left his hand lying over it. I walked by and glanced down but he kept his hand pressed on the card.

The fish men were everywhere in Yeoung-Deoung-Po. They gravitated around the massive shopping mall that was built over the local underground station. They were homeless men who had lost or severely injured one or both of their legs. Some Koreans I spoke to told me that they had been born without legs and they had become homeless because their families had been too poor to care for them.

They lived their lives lying face down on a skateboard; the palms of the hands propelled them. They covered the lower half of their bodies with old rubber suits. They looked like wetsuits to me, and many of them had bright fluorescent markings on them.

The legs of these suits flopped behind their skateboard, like a wet sock hung over a fence. Sometimes they would be tied together in a tight, dust-covered knot; this knot looked a bit like a fishtail.

Over time, the empty legs of the suit became frayed and torn, and sometimes I saw a stump of scarred flesh sticking out of a hole as one of them passed me, low down, in the street. Many of them carried an old plastic cassette player that hung from a string looped around their neck. From these cassette players came melancholy and sickly sweet Korean ballads.

One night I had an encounter with one of the fish men, and the memory of it has stayed with me. I was sleeping over at Andy’s.

Andy’s place was in the basement of a building that was four stories high and contained a family on each floor. On this night I slept in a spare room with no bed; the linoleum stuck to my clammy skin and I slept in a fretful manner. Andy and his Korean girlfriend, Stacey, were in the room next door. I awoke very late in the night and lay there half-asleep until I became aware of the sound of something moving slowly – scraping, music -dragging itself through the dark lanes outside.

There was a small rectangular window near the top of the wall. It was around the size of a shoebox and four bars ran vertically down it at intervals. The window was only really there for ventilation purposes. I looked out and saw a figure in the lane.

The figure – I couldn’t see his face – was looking in on Andy and his girlfriend lying naked and entangled on their bed. I wanted to shout something, but the darkness of the basement and the strangeness of the music paralyzed me. The scraping began again and the music lingered in his wake until there was silence.

Seoraksan is a mountain range to the east of Seoul. It took us eight hours of travel by bus to get there. It was a cold autumn day, and we had left Seoul at midnight to get an early start at the mountain. We hiked all day, and by the time the sun went down we had reached our resting place for the night, a group of buildings built on a plateau. It was very cold, and we awoke early again the next morning in bad spirits and began the final part of our climb. We walked almost all of that day within clouds. At the top of the mountain, we broke the clouds, and were able to enjoy some sunshine, yet looking down we could only see a white mist.

We sat down and rested, and I looked over at a group of old men who were drinking from flasks nearby. They must have been in their seventies. Mountains cover over sixty percent of South Korea, and the main pastime for retired people is to climb these mountains every weekend. This pastime is referred to as the grey olympics. One man from the group looked up and waved a bottle in my direction. I sat down in his group and took the bottle.

It was a sharp, bitter alcohol that made my face go red. The old men slapped me on the back and roared laughing. When I had recovered they urged me to try another bottle, this time with a different taste but the same strong kick.

I gathered through my broken Korean that they each brewed their own kind of alcohol. One of them told me he had made his from sap collected from the trees on this mountain.

We, about ten of us, drank from three or four bottles. I pointed a bottle at the clouds and said in English, “What a view.”

We had spent a day and half hiking to see nothing. Yet above us the sky was blue and the sun shone, and I let my legs hang over the precipice, and none of us felt the need to say anything. Some time later I perceived that a crowd had gathered behind us and was making a low excited noise. I pulled myself to my feet. My body felt cumbersome compared to the lightness of my thoughts.

We were gathered on the upper peak of the mountain. A number of large jagged rocks struck upwards from this peak. They were nearly vertical, and could not be reached except by experienced rock climbers. On top of one of these peaks, there stood a man. He was stripped from the waist up and wore a black pair of spandex shorts. The crowd had gathered for him. After a number of minutes I understood that he was going to jump from this large rock tower onto another, shorter tower of rocks, some ten or twelve feet away, but if he missed it he would fall some eighty feet.

He walked to the edge of his rock. He counted his steps backwards and then stood looking out into the mid-distance, moving up and down on the tips of his toes. He took some white powder from a pouch tied to the small of his back and clapped his hands together, covering them in a burst of fine dust.

He hunched down into a sprinter’s starting position, his head bent low. He’s thinking of the distance, I told myself. For a moment his body seemed to sag downwards, then he shot forward, and he was running with quick sharp strides that stretched out as he approached the edge. He sprang into the air, and landed, hands in front of him, midriff first against the rounded stone of the shorter tower’s overhang.

The crowd screamed both in excitement and fear. His fingers dug into the cliff face and he didn’t move for minute or so. He had hurt his ribs, and a group of men, his friends perhaps, began to prepare to ascend the tower to help him. Then he stretched one hand upwards and began to heave himself to the top of the tower. His body was wet with sweat.

In this slow way he eventually came to the top and rolled over onto his back, out of sight. From our angle below him we could make out one of his fists as he thumped the air in defiance. The crowd cheered, and I joined in.

On the way down again, we each travelled at our own pace. We became spread out and separated. I walked alone and breathed in the fresh smell of the tall pines of the middle section of the mountain. After some time I broke through the clouds and, far off, I could see the lights of Seoul spread out over a great distance.

Andy was a big part of Korea for me. He was an American expat, twenty-nine years old, short and a little overweight. He had a handsome face; his eyes and lips were almost feminine. He was the first expat I met in Korea. I’d spent around three days wandering around the lanes and alleys near my love motel, and I was beginning to wonder if the school had forgotten about me, when Andy burst into my cramped room one evening.

Andy had a hedonistic attitude to life. This was his seventh year in Korea. He rarely took any matter seriously and delighted in antagonizing Koreans. He liked to wear a red t-shirt with a picture of Kim Jong-il on the front of it.

All the other teachers were just passing through Korea. A main attraction to me was that I could escape the expectations of home. I was in Korea with the vague idea of becoming a writer. I was under the impression that being a writer was something worthy and great and would require me to move halfway around the world. It was a place where a stronger, more disciplined self would emerge.

Andy had come to Korea because he had head-onned another car at high speed. He hurt both himself and the driver of the other car. He had been driving with no insurance, and faced with a hefty medical bill and a court appearance, he ran and ended up in Korea, where his sister had been stationed in the US Military.

In spring, M and I took a trip together to the east coast of Korea. Two of our friends came with us, another couple. On the second afternoon we rented quads from the nearby village. We all wore old-fashioned goggles and round matte-black helmets with no visor, the kind you see motorcyclists wearing in World War II documentaries.

We started up the bikes, and they let out a low rumble as they warmed up in the cold spring air. Later we sped them down country roads, down into the valleys between the mountains, and then M and I turned onto a small road in one valley and tore down a dirt path that ran beside a river, swollen and quick moving.

The track turned at a sharp angle, away from the river and led us up a steep and long slope, through a deepening forest. We moved slowly now and then came to a clearing; a small lake was in front of us; it was completely frozen. A large rock cliff was on the other side.

The frozen remains of a waterfall shimmered brightly on this cliff. We threw stones onto the lake to test it; and then, after they had bounced off the hard ice, we walked on the lake and made our way toward the waterfall. At certain points the rocks curved inwards, and here the ice hung straight down in long crystal fingers.

The frozen waterfall stretched up the cliff face and out of sight. Light blue and glaring white, it glinted in the sun. We stayed there under a spell cast by the seclusion of the place.

A friend of mine had once told me that to win a woman’s love, you needed to create a great story for her. I had smiled at the time and not paid much attention to him. This waterfall though, and the memory of the waterfall, became something significant to both of us. She drove the bike down the mountain track. Her black hair swept into my face.

Later that evening I watched footprints she left on the wooden floor after showering slowly disappear. The moonlight came in the window and I went out onto the balcony. The cold was terrific.

Andy knocked over to my apartment one afternoon. He asked me to go drink a beer with him. M had travelled to Australia to study for a year, and I was going to join her there in a few months. I had to see out my contract with the school first. I hadn’t spent time with Andy in the previous months, and I had missed his strange charm. We bought some beers in a 7-Eleven and walked further down past the large shopping mall and into one of the many car parks in that area. We took an elevator to the top level and went through a door and climbed up a flight of stairs, arriving on the flat, concrete roof of the building. We could sit up here undisturbed for the evening.

The sun and fumes cast a yellow haze upon the city. It was summer, and it was very hot. The shadow of taller building crept across the roof towards us and then Andy said: “Stacey is leaving me.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“She’ll be back, though. They always come back when they need you for something. She’ll come back when she wants me to pay for her college fees.”

“You shouldn’t let her go.”

He seemed down and suddenly he looked tired. “She was the only girl I could ever make come. It’s a great feeling to be on your way home and know you have a girl waiting for you to arrive, waiting for you to give her an orgasm.”

We drank the beer and leaned our backs into the small wall on the roof; the sun was setting.

“I met her folks one time. Did you ever meet M’s folks ?”

“No. She never suggested it.”

“I met her folks and they were crazy about me. Her mother made such a fuss out of me the whole time I was there. They made me feel real welcome. They didn’t have to do that. You’ll enjoy Australia. Don’t come back here, though. Try and stay out there with her.”

I never saw him again after that, although he sent me emails occasionally. The emails contained very little text, mostly he just attached pictures of himself spray-painting, or growing marijuana in his basement, or of some girl he was dating. The last email I got from him showed him in a hotel room. He was dressed up in the stewardess uniform for a Japanese airline. His body was bursting out of it. The girl who owned the uniform slept on the bed behind him.

Tristan Burke lives in Galway