by Adam Johnson
Jun Do said, “The Second Mate didn’t ask for the Americans to come back. He wasn’t looking for trouble, let alone death. You did hear how he was eaten alive by sharks, right?”
The old man didn’t say anything.
“Shouldn’t you have a pencil or some paper or something?”
“We picked up your friend in a raft this morning. This was even before you radioed in about your so-called attack. He had plenty of cigarettes, but he had fumbled his matches and they were wet. They said your friend had been crying over what he’d done, that he couldn’t stop.”
Jun Do’s mind turned on that. That poor, stupid boy, he thought. Jun Do had thought the two of them were in this together, but now he understood he was alone, and all he had was the story.
“I wish that lie you just told were true,” Jun Do said, “because then the Second Mate would be alive, then he wouldn’t have died in front of all of us. Then the Captain wouldn’t have to tell his wife that she’ll never see him again.”
“He’ll never be seen again, you can count on that,” the old man said. Again it looked like he’d gone to sleep. “Don’t you want to know the reasons he defected? I believe he mentioned your name.”
“The Second Mate was a friend and a hero,” Jun Do said. “You should maybe show some respect for the dead.”
The old man stood. “What I should maybe do is confirm your story,” he said, and the first assault that followed was brief and frontal—several snapping blows to the face, and with one arm hurt and the other holding the blood bag, there was nothing for Jun Do to do but take it.
“Tell me whose idea it was,” the old man said. He struck Jun Do once on each collarbone. “Why didn’t you launch him farther south, closer to the DMZ?” Jun Do was somehow trapped in the chair, and two chopping blows to the floater ribs anchored him for good. “Why didn’t more of you defect? Or were you casting him away?” In quick succession, pain flashed in his neck, nose, and ear, and then his eyes didn’t seem to work right.
“The Americans came back,” Jun Do said. “They were blaring music. They wore street clothes, including shoes with silver swooshes. One of them threatened to burn the ship. He had a lighter with a cruise missile on it. They had made fun of us because we didn’t have a toilet but now they made fun of us because we did.”
The old man punched Jun Do directly in the breastplate, and in the fire of his new tattoo, he felt Sun Moon’s face as a burning outline over his heart. The old man stopped to pour more tea, but he did not drink. He just warmed his hands around the cup. Jun Do now understood how it would go. In the military, his pain mentor was Kimsan. The whole first week, they sat at a table, not unlike this one, and contemplated a candle burning between them. There was the flame, small and hot at its tip. There was the glow, warm on their faces. Then there was the darkness beyond the glow. Never let pain push you into the darkness, Kimsan said. There you are nobody and you are alone. Once you turn from the flame, it is over.
The old man began again, this time asking not about the Second Mate in the raft, but the Second Mate on the Junma, about how many sharks, how high the seas, whether the American rifles were on safety. The old man was pacing himself, dealing long, slow strings of measured blows, to the cheeks and mouth and ears, switching to the soft body when his hands seemed to hurt. In the candle’s flame, the fingertip hurts, though the whole rest of the body is in the warm glow of its light. Keep the pain in the fingertip and your body in the glow. Jun Do put up his partitions—a strike to the shoulder must hurt only the shoulder and he mentally cordoned that off from the rest of the body. And when the strikes came to the face, Jun Do would adjust his head as the strike was delivered, so no two landed in the same place. Keep the flame on the fingers, keep the fingers in motion, let the rest of you relax in the glow.
A wince of pain crossed the old man’s face and he stopped to stretch his back. Bending this way and that, he said, “There’s a lot of big talk about the war. Practically everyone was named a hero. Even trees have been named heroes. It’s true. Everyone in my division is a war hero, except for the new guys, of course. Maybe your friend became a hero, and you didn’t like that. Maybe you wanted to be one, too.”
Jun Do tried to stay in the glow, but he was having trouble focusing. He kept wondering when the next punch was coming.
“If you ask me,” the old man said, “heroes are unstable and unpredictable. They get the job done, but damned if they’re not difficult to work with. Trust me, I know,” he said, and pointed to a long scar down his arm. “In my division, all the new guys are college types.”
When the glint returned to the old man’s eyes, he grabbed the back of Jun Do’s neck to brace himself. Then came a series of dull blows to Jun Do’s stomach. “Who threw him in the water?” he asked and delivered one to the sternum. “What were his last words?” One, two, three, they came. “Why don’t you know what the Captain was doing?” The fists pushed the air from his lungs. “Why didn’t you radio for help?” Then the old man answered all his own questions: “Because the Americans never came. Because you got tired of that crazy punk and you killed him and threw him overboard. You’re all going to the camps, you know that, it’s already been decided. So you might as well just tell me.”
The old man broke off. He paced for a moment, one hand inside the other, eyes shut with what seemed like relief. Then Jun Do heard Kimsan’s voice, as if he were very close, right in the room. You are the flame, Kimsan said. The old man keeps touching the hot flame of you with only his hands. Kimsan would tell him to also hit with his elbows and forearms and feet and knees, but only his hands touch your flame, and look how it burns him.
“I can’t say I was thinking,” Jun Do said. “But when I jumped, the saltwater on my new tattoo made me panic. The sharks would baby bite, muzzling you before they went for meat, and the Americans were laughing with all their white teeth and those two things became one in my head.”
The old man came back in frustration. “No,” he said. “These are all lies.” Then he went to work again. As the blows came, he told Jun Do everything that was wrong with the story, how they were jealous of the mate’s new hero status, how Jun Do couldn’t remember people’s clothes, how … the flame is tiny. It would take all day to burn the whole surface of your body. You must stay in the glow. You must never go into the darkness, for there you are alone, and people don’t come back. Kimsan said this was the most difficult lesson for Jun Do, because that’s what he’d done as a boy, gone into the darkness. That was the lesson his parents had taught him, whoever they were. If you go into the darkness, if you turn off like that, you could do anything—you could clean tanks at the Pangu paint factory until your head throbbed and you coughed pink mist and the sky above turned yellow. You could good-naturedly smile when other kids got adopted by smelters and meat factories, and when you were crouched in the darkness, you could say “Lucky you” and “So long” when men with Chinese accents came.
It was difficult to tell how long the old man had been working on him. All his sentences ran together to make one sentence that didn’t make sense. Jun Do was there, in the water, he could see the Second Mate. “I was trying to grab the Second Mate,” Jun Do said, “but his body would pop and jag and shift, and I knew what they were doing to him, I knew what was happening below the surface. In my hands he didn’t weigh anything, it was like trying to rescue a seat cushion, that’s all that was left of him, but still I couldn’t do it.”
When Jun Do had cordoned off the pounding in his eyes, and the hot blood in his nose, when he’d stopped the split in his lips and the sting in his ears from coming inside, when he’d blocked his arms and torso and shoulders from feeling, when that was all blocked off, there was only the inside of him, and what he discovered was a little boy in there who was stupidly smiling, who had no idea what was happening to the man outside. And suddenly the story was true, it had been beaten into him, and he began crying because the Second Mate had died and there was nothing he could do about it.
He could suddenly see him in the dark water, the whole scene lit by the red glow of a single flare.
“My friend,” Jun Do said, the tears streaming down his face, “I couldn’t save him. He was alone and the water was dark. I couldn’t even save a piece of him. I looked in his eyes, and he didn’t know where he was. He was calling for help, saying, I think I need a rescue, his voice calm and eerie, and then my leg was going over the side and I was in the water.”
The old man paused. He stood there with his hands held high, like a surgeon. They were covered with spit and mucus and blood.
Jun Do kept going. “It’s dark, I don’t know where I am, he said. I’m here, I told him, listen to the sound of my voice. He asked, Are you out there? I put my hand on his face, which was cold and white. I can’t be where I think I am, he said. A ship is out there—I can’t see its lights. That was the last thing he said.”
“I can’t see its lights? Why would he say that?” When Jun Do said nothing, the old man asked, “But you did try to rescue him, didn’t you? Isn’t that when you got bit? And the Americans, you said their guns were on you, right?”
The blood bag in Jun Do’s hand weighed a thousand kilos, and it was all he could do to keep it aloft. When he managed to focus his eye he saw that the bag was empty. He looked at the old man. “What?” he asked.
“Earlier you said his last words were All praise Kim Jong Il, Dear Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea? You admit that’s a lie.”
The candle had gone out. The flame, the glow, the darkness—they were all suddenly gone and now there was nothing. Kimsan never talked about what to do after the pain.
“Don’t you see? It’s all a lie,” Jun Do said. “Why didn’t I radio for help? Why didn’t I get the crew to mount a real rescue? If the whole crew worked together, we could’ve saved him. I should have begged the crew, I should have gotten on my knees. But I didn’t do anything. I just got wet. The only thing I felt was the sting of my tattoo.”
The old man took the other chair. He poured fresh tea, and this time he drank it. “No one else got wet,” he said. “You don’t see anyone else with a shark bite.” He looked around the building as if wondering for the first time what kind of place this was. “I’m going to retire soon,” he said. “Soon all the old-timers will be gone. I don’t know what’s going to happen to this country.”
“What will become of her?” Jun Do asked.
“The Second Mate’s wife? Don’t worry, we’ll find someone good. We’ll find someone worthy of his memory.”
From his pack, the old man shook out a cigarette and with some struggle, lit it. The brand was Chollima, the kind they smoked in Pyongyang. “Looks like your ship is a regular hero factory,” he said.
Jun Do kept trying to drop the blood bag, but his hand wouldn’t let go. A person could learn to turn an arm off, so you didn’t feel anything that happened to it, but how did you turn it back on?
“I’m certifying you,” the old man said. “Your story checks out.”
Jun Do turned to him. “What story are you talking about?”
“What story?” the old man asked. “You’re a hero now.”
The old man offered Jun Do a cigarette, but Jun Do couldn’t take it.
“But the facts,” Jun Do said. “They don’t add up. Where are the answers?”
“There’s no such thing as facts. In my world, all the answers you need to know come from here.” He pointed at himself, and Jun Do couldn’t tell if the old man indicated his heart, his gut, or his balls.
“But where are they?” Jun Do asked. He could see the girl rower shooting flares his way, he could feel the Mate’s cold cheek as the sharks pulled him under. “Will we ever find them?”
JUN DO dreamed of sharks biting him, of the actress Sun Moon blinking and squinting, the way Rumina had when the sand was in her eyes. He dreamed of the Second Mate drifting farther and farther into that harsh light. A stab of pain would arrive, and was he awake or asleep? His eyes roamed the insides of lids swollen shut. The endless smell of fish. Shock-work whistles signaled dawn, and he knew night had arrived when the hum of a little fridge went off with the power.
All his joints felt locked up, and taking too deep a breath was like opening the furnace slats of pain. When his good arm could finally reach over to inspect the bad arm, he could feel fat horsefly hairs, the coarse thread of surgical stitching. He had a half memory of the Captain helping him up the stairs of the community housing block where the Second Mate lived with his wife.
The loudspeaker—Citizens!—took care of him during the day. Afternoons, she came from the cannery, the faint scent of machine oil still on her hands. The little teapot would rattle and whistle and she would hum along with The March of Kim Jong Il, which signaled the end of the news. Then her hands, ice cold with alcohol, would disinfect his wounds. Those hands rolled him left and right to change the sheets and empty his bladder, and he was sure he could feel in her fingers the trace of her wedding ring.
Soon, the swelling had gone down, and now it was gunk sealing his eyes shut, rather than inflammation. She was there with a hot cloth to steam them open. “There he is,” she said when his vision was finally back. “The man who loves Sun Moon.”
Jun Do lifted his head. He was on a pallet on the floor, naked under a light yellow sheet. He recognized the louvered windows of the housing block. The room was strung with little perch, drying on wires like laundry.
She said, “My father believed that if his daughter married a fisherman, she’d never starve.”
And into focus came the Second Mate’s wife.
“What floor are we on?” he asked.
“The tenth.”
“How’d you get me up here?”
“It wasn’t so bad. The way my husband described you, I thought you’d be a lot bigger.” She ran the hot cloth over his chest, and he tried not to wince. “Your poor actress, her face is black and blue. It makes her look old, like her time has passed. Have you seen her movies?”
Shaking his head no made his neck hurt.
“Me either,” she said. “Not in this dumpy town. The only movie I ever saw was a foreign film, a love story.” She immersed the cloth in hot water again, then soaked the ridges of all his scars. “It was about a ship that hits an iceberg and everybody dies.”
She climbed onto the pallet next to him. With both arms, she muscled him over and onto his side. She held a jar to him and maneuvered it until his umkyoung was inside. “Come on,” she said, then gave him a couple claps on the back to get him going. His body pulsed in pain, and then the stream began. When he was done, she lifted the jar to the light. The fluid was cloudy and rust-colored. “Getting better,” she announced. “Soon you’ll be walking down the hall to the tenth-floor toilet like a big boy.”
Jun Do tried to roll onto his back by himself, but he couldn’t, so he just lay there, curled on his side. On the wall, beneath the portraits of the Dear and Great Leaders, was a little shelf with the Second Mate’s “America” shoes on them. Jun Do tried to figure out how the Second Mate had gotten them home, when the whole crew had seen them go into the water. Tacked large on the wall was the main chart from the Junma. It showed the entire Korean Sea, and it was the chart by which all the other charts onboard were referenced. They’d thought it burned with the others in the fire. On it were pushpins marking every fishing ground they’d visited, and in pencil were traced the coordinates of several northerly positions.
“Is that the course of the rowers?” Jun Do asked her.
“The rowers?” she asked. “This is a map of all the places he’d been. The red pins are cities he’d heard about. He was always talking about the places he’d take me.”
She looked into Jun Do’s eyes.
“What?” he asked.
“Did he really do it? Did he really pull a knife on American commandos, or is that some bullshit story you guys cooked up?”
“Why would you listen to me?”
“Because you’re
an intelligence officer,” she said. “Because you don’t give a shit about anybody around this backwater. When your mission’s done, you’ll go back to Pyongyang and never think about fishermen again.”
“And what’s my mission?”
“There’s going to be a war at the bottom of the ocean,” she said. “Maybe my husband shouldn’t have told me, but he did.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” he said. “I’m just a radio guy. And yes, your husband took on the U.S. Navy with a knife.”
She shook her head with muted admiration.
“He had so many crazy plans,” she said. “Hearing that makes me think if he’d have lived, he might have really gone through with one.”
She ladled sweetened rice water into Jun Do’s mouth, then rolled him back, covering him with a sheet again. The room was getting dark, and soon the power would fail.
“Look, I’ve got to go out,” she said. “If you have an emergency, give a yell, and the floor official will come. She’s at the door if someone so much as farts in here.”
She took a sponge bath by the door, where he couldn’t see her. He could only hear the faint sound of the cloth on her skin and the sound of water as it dripped from her body to the pan she crouched in. He wondered if it was the same cloth she’d used on him.
Before she left, she stood over him in a dress that bore the wrinkles of having been hand-wrung and hung to dry. Though he beheld her through the oceany vision of newly opened eyes, it was clear she was a true beauty—tall and square-shouldered, yet cloaked in a soft layer of baby fat. Her eyes were large and unpredictable and black bobbed hair framed a round face. She had an English dictionary in her hand. “I’ve seen some people get hurt at the cannery,” she said. “You’re going to be all right.” Then, in English, she added, “Sweet dreams.”