The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  “I didn’t,” Jun Do told him.

  “When he woke in the hospital, he asked, Where’s my arm, and the doctors said, Sorry, but we had to amputate, and the captain says, I know my arm is gone, where is it, but they won’t tell him. He can feel it, he says, making a fist without him. In the tub, he can feel the hot water with his missing arm. But where is it—in the trash or burned? He knows it’s out there, he can literally feel it, but he’s got no powers.”

  “To me,” Jun Do said, “what everybody gets wrong about ghosts is the notion that they’re dead. In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.”

  “Like the Captain’s wife?”

  “Like the Captain’s wife.”

  “I never even met her,” the Second Mate said. “But I see her face on the Captain, and it’s hard not to wonder where she is and who she’s with and does she still think about the Captain.”

  Jun Do lifted his beer and drank in honor of this insight.

  “Or maybe your Americans at the bottom of the ocean,” the Second Mate said. “You hear them down there tinkering around, you know they’re important, but they’re just beyond your reach. It only makes sense, you know, it’s right in line with your profile.”

  “My profile? What’s my profile?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” the Second Mate said. “Just something the Captain talked about once.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He only said that you were an orphan, that they were always after things they couldn’t have.”

  “Really? You sure he didn’t say it was because orphans try to steal other people’s lives?”

  “Don’t get upset. The Captain just said I shouldn’t be too friendly with you.”

  “Or that when they die, orphans like to take other people with them? Or that there’s always a reason someone becomes an orphan? There are all kinds of things people say about orphans, you know.”

  The Second Mate put his hand up. “Look,” he said. “The Captain just told me that nobody had ever taught you loyalty.”

  “Like you know anything about it. And if you have any interest in facts, I’m not even an orphan.”

  “He said you’d say that. He wasn’t trying to be mean,” the Second Mate said. “He just said that the military weeds out all the orphans and puts them through special training that makes them not have feelings when bad things happen to other people.”

  Through the window, the sun was starting to glow in the rigging of the fishing fleet. And the young woman outside stepped aside every time a two-wheeled, fish-hauling cart came by.

  Jun Do said, “How about you tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “I told you,” he said. “I wanted to show you my wife—she’s very beautiful, don’t you think?”

  Jun Do just looked at him.

  The Second Mate went on, “Of course she is. She’s like a magnet, you know, you can’t resist her beauty. My tattoo doesn’t do her justice. And we practically have a family already. I’m a hero now, of course, and it’s pretty much a lock that I’ll make Captain someday. I’m just saying, I’m a guy who’s got a lot to lose.” The Second Mate paused, choosing his words. “But you, you got no one. You’re on a cot in the kitchen of a monster’s house.” The woman outside made a gesture of beckoning, but the Second Mate waved her off. “If you’d just punched that American in the face,” he said, “you’d be in Seoul by now, you’d be free. That’s what I don’t get. If a guy has no strings, what’s stopping him?”

  How to tell the Second Mate that the only way to shake your ghosts was to find them, and that the only place Jun Do could do that was right here. How to explain the recurring dream that he’s listening to his radio, that he’s getting the remnants of important messages, from his mother, from other boys in his orphanage. The messages are hard to dial in, and he’s awoken before with his hand on the bunk post, as if it were his UHF fine tuner. Sometimes the messages are from people who are relaying messages from other people who have spoken to people who have seen his mother. His mother wants to get urgent messages to him. She wants to tell him where she is, she wants to tell him why, she keeps repeating her name, over and over, though he can’t quite make it out. How to explain that in Seoul, he knows, the messages would stop.

  “Come,” Jun Do said. “We should get you to the Captain for some stitches.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m a hero. I get to go to the hospital now.”

  When the Junma left port again, they had new portraits of the Great and Dear Leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. They had a new galley table, and they also had a new commode, for it was not right for a hero to shit in a bucket, though heroes of North Korea have endured far worse and done so without complaint. They also had a new DPRK flag, which they lowered eleven kilometers from shore.

  The Captain was in high spirits. On deck was a new locker, and with a foot upon it, he called the crew together. From the locker, he first produced a hand grenade. “This,” he said, “I have been given in the event the Americans return. I am to drop it in the aft hold and scuttle our dear ship the Junma.”

  Jun Do’s eyes went wide. “Why not drop it in the engine room?”

  The Machinist gave him a screw you look.

  The Captain then threw the grenade into the sea, where it made not so much as a zip as it went under the surface. To Jun Do, he said, “Don’t worry, I would have knocked first.” The Captain kicked open the locker to reveal an inflatable life raft, clearly taken out of an old Soviet passenger jet. It had once been orange, but was now faded to a dull peach, and next to its red handle was an ominous warning against smoking during deployment. “After the grenade goes off, and our beloved vessel slips below the waves, I have been ordered to deploy this, lest we lose the life of our resident hero. I don’t have to tell you the trust that has been placed in us to receive such a gift.”

  The Second Mate stepped forward, almost as if he was afraid of the thing, to inspect the Cyrillic writing. “It’s bigger than the other one,” he said.

  “A whole planeload of people could fit in that raft,” the Machinist told him. “Or the greatness of one hero.”

  “Yeah,” the First Mate said. “I for one would be honored to tread water next to a raft that contained a true Hero of the Eternal Revolution.”

  But the Captain wasn’t done. “And I figure it is time to make the Third Mate an official member of our crew.” He withdrew from his pocket a folded piece of waxed paper. Within this were nine fine sewing needles, cauterized together. The tips of the needles were blackened from many tattooings. “I’m no Russian,” he told Jun Do, “but you’ll see I became pretty handy at this. And here we don’t even have to worry about the ink freezing.”

  In the galley, they reclined Jun Do upon the table and had him take off his shirt. When the Pilot saw Jun Do’s naked chest, he said, “Ah, a virgin,” and everyone laughed.

  “Look,” Jun Do said, “I’m not so sure about this. I’m not even married.”

  “Relax,” the Captain said. “I’m going to give you the most beautiful wife in the world.”

  While the Pilot and the First Mate flipped through the calendar of the actress Sun Moon, the Captain sprinkled his powdered ink into a spoon and mixed it with drops of water until it was just wetter than paste. The calendar had hung for a long time in the pilothouse, but Jun Do had never really given it much attention because it reeked of the patriotism that came over the loudspeakers. He’d only ever glimpsed a couple of movies in his life, and those were Chinese war movies his unit was shown during bad weather days in the military. Certainly there’d been posters around for Sun Moon’s movies, but they must not have seemed to apply to him. Now, watching the First Mate and Pilot flip through the movie posters, discussing which one had the best image and expression for a tattoo, he was jealous of the way they recalled famous scenes and lines of North Korea’s national actress. He noted a depth and sadness in Sun Moon’s eyes, the faint lines ar
ound them bespeaking a resoluteness in the face of loss, and it took everything in him to suppress the memory of Rumina. And then the idea of a portrait, of any person, placed over your heart, forever, seemed irresistible. How was it that we didn’t walk around with every person who mattered tattooed on us forever? And then Jun Do remembered that he had no one that mattered to him, which was why his tattoo would be of an actress he’d never seen, taken from a calendar at the helm of a fishing boat.

  “If she’s such a famous actress,” Jun Do said, “then everyone in North Korea will recognize her and know she’s not my wife.”

  “The tattoo,” the Captain said, “is for the Americans and South Koreans. To them, it will simply be a female face.”

  “Honestly,” Jun Do said. “I don’t even know why you guys do this, what’s the point of tattooing your wife’s face on your chest?”

  The Second Mate said, “Because you’re a fisherman, that’s why.”

  “So they can identify your body,” the Pilot said.

  The quiet Machinist said, “So that whenever you think of her, there she is.”

  “Oh, that sounds noble,” the First Mate said. “But it’s to give the wives peace of mind. They think no other woman will sleep with a man who has such a tattoo, but there are ways of course, there are girls.”

  “There is only one reason,” the Captain said. “It’s because it places her in your heart forever.”

  Jun Do thought about that. A childish question came to him, one that marked him as someone who had never known any kind of love. “Are you placing Sun Moon in my heart forever?” he asked.

  “Oh, our young Third Mate,” the Captain said, smiling to the others. “She’s an actress. When you see her movies, that’s not really her. Those are just characters she plays.”

  Jun Do said, “I haven’t seen her movies.”

  “There you go, then,” the Captain said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “What kind of name is Sun Moon?” Jun Do asked.

  “I guess she’s a celebrity,” the Captain said. “Maybe all the yangbans in Pyongyang have strange names.”

  They selected an image from Tyrants Asunder. It was a head shot, and instead of staring duty-bound toward a distant imperialist army or looking up to Mount Paektu for guidance, Sun Moon here regarded the viewer with a reverence for all they would have lost together by the time the final movie credits rolled.

  The Pilot held the calendar steady, and the Captain began with her eyes. He had a good technique—he’d draw the needles backward, teasing them in and out of the skin with the kind of shimmy you use to cinch a bosun’s knot. That way the pain was less, and the needle tips went in at an angle, anchoring the ink. The Captain used a wet rag to wash away stray ink and blood.

  As he worked, the Captain wondered aloud to himself. “What should the Third Mate know of his new wife?” he mused. “Her beauty is obvious. She is from Pyongyang, a place none of us will ever see. She was discovered by the Dear Leader himself and cast in A True Daughter of the Country, the first North Korean movie. How old was she then?”

  “Sixteen,” the First Mate said.

  “That sounds about right,” the Pilot said. “How old are you?” he asked the Second Mate.

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty,” the Pilot said. “That movie was made the year you were born.”

  The roll of the ship seemed not to bother the Captain at all. “She was the darling of the Dear Leader, and she was the only actress. No one else could star in a movie, and this went on for years. Also, despite her beauty, or because of it, the Dear Leader would not allow her to marry, so that all of her roles were only roles, as she did not know herself of love.”

  “But then came Commander Ga,” said the Machinist.

  “Then came Commander Ga,” the Captain repeated in the absent way of someone lost in fine details. “Yes, he is the reason you don’t have to worry about Sun Moon being placed too deeply in your heart.”

  Jun Do had heard of Commander Ga—he was practically preached in the military as a man who’d led six assassination missions into South Korea, won the Golden Belt in taekwondo, and purged the Army of all the homosexuals.

  The Second Mate said, “Commander Ga even fought a bear.”

  “I’m not so sure about that part,” the Captain said, outlining the subtle contours of Sun Moon’s neck. “When Commander Ga went to Japan and beat Kimura, everyone knew that upon his return to Pyongyang, he would name his prize. The Dear Leader made him Minister of Prison Mines, which is a coveted position, as there is no work to be done. But Commander Ga demanded possession of the actress Sun Moon. Time passed, there was trouble in the capital. Finally, the Dear Leader bitterly relented. The couple married, had two children, and now Sun Moon is remote and melancholy and alone.”

  Everyone went quiet when the Captain said this, and Jun Do suddenly felt for her.

  The Second Mate threw him a pained look. “Is that true?” he asked. “Do you know that’s how she ended up?”

  “That’s how all wives end up,” the Captain said.

  Late that night, Jun Do’s chest hurt, and he yearned to hear from the girl who rowed in the dark. The Captain had told him that seawater would keep the tattoo from getting septic, but Jun Do wouldn’t take the chance of going up top for a bucket and missing her. More and more, he felt as if he was the only one in the world who understood her. It was Jun Do’s curse to be nocturnal in a nation without power at night, but it was his duty, too, like picking up a pair of oars at sunset or letting the loudspeakers fill your head as you sleep. Even the crew thought of her as rowing toward dawn, as if dawn was a metaphor for something transcendent or utopian. Jun Do understood that she was rowing until dawn, when with weariness and fulfillment she could pack it in for sleep. It was deep into the night when he finally found her signal, faint from traveling so far from the north.

  “The guidance system is broken,” she said. “It keeps saying the wrong things. We’re not where it says we are, we can’t be. Something’s out on the water, but we can’t see it.”

  The line went quiet, and Jun Do reached to fine-tune the signal.

  Then she was back. “Does this work?” she asked. “Is it working? There’s a ship out there, a ship without lights. We shot it with a flare. The red streak bounced off the hull. Is anyone out there, can anyone rescue us?”

  Who was attacking her? he wondered. What pirate would attack a woman who wished nothing more than to make her way through the dark? Jun Do heard a pop over the line—was it the pop of gunfire?—and parading through his head came all the reasons it was impossible to rescue her: that she was too far north, that the Americans would find her, that they didn’t even have maps of those waters. All true, but of course the real reason was him. Jun Do was why they couldn’t chart a course to rescue her. He reached forward and turned off the receiver, the green afterimage of its dials lingering in his eyes. He felt the sudden static of cool air when he removed his headphones. Up on deck, he scanned the horizon, looking for the lone red arc of her emergency flare.

  “Lose something?” the Captain asked. He was just a voice from the helm.

  Jun Do turned to see the tip of his glowing cigarette.

  “Yeah,” Jun Do said. “I think I did.”

  The Captain didn’t leave the pilothouse. “That boy’s pretty messed up right now,” he said. “The last thing he needs is some craziness from you.”

  Using a lanyard, Jun Do fished a bucket of water from the sea and poured it on his chest. He felt the pain as a memory, something from long ago. He looked upon the sea some more. The black waves would rise and clap, and in the troughs between them, you could imagine anything was out there. Someone will save you, he thought. If you just hold tight long enough, someone’s bound to.

  The crew put down longlines all day, and when Jun Do woke at sunset, they were bringing aboard the first sharks. Now that they’d been boarded by Americans, the Captain was no longer afraid of being boarded by America
ns. He asked that Jun Do channel the broadcasts through a speaker on the deck. It would be late, Jun Do warned them, before the naked rower checked in, if that’s what they were hoping for.

  The night was clear, with regular rollers from the northeast, and the deck lights penetrated far into the water, showing the red eyeshine of creatures just a little too deep to make out. Jun Do used the array antenna, and rolled the crew through the whole spectrum, from the ultralow booms of sub-to-sub communications to the barking of transponders guiding jet autopilots through the night. He let them listen to the interference caused when the radar of distant vessels swept through them. At the top of the dial was the shrill rattle of a braille book broadcaster, and out there at the very peak was the trancelike hiss of solar radiation in the Van Allen belts. The Captain was more interested in the drunk Russians singing while they operated an offshore drilling platform. He muttered every fourth or fifth line, and if they gave him a minute, he said, he’d name the song.

  The first three sharks they brought aboard had been eaten by a larger shark, and nothing remained below the gills. Jun Do found a woman in Jakarta who read English sonnets into a shortwave, and he approximated them as the Captain and mates examined the bite radius and peered through the sharks’ empty heads. He played for them two men in unknown countries who were attempting to solve a mathematical problem over a ham radio, but it proved very difficult to translate. For a while, Jun Do would stare toward the northerly horizon, then he would force himself not to stare. They listened to planes and ships and the strange echoes that came from the curve of the earth. Jun Do tried to explain concepts like FedEx, and the men debated whether a parcel could really be sent between any two humans on earth in twenty-four hours.

  The Second Mate kept asking about the naked rower.

  “I bet her nipples are like icicles,” he said. “And her thighs must be white with goose pimples.”

  “We won’t hear from her until dawn,” Jun Do said. “No use talking about it till then.”