The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

Our rival interrogation team is the Pubyok, named after the “floating wall” defenders that saved Pyongyang from invaders in 1136. There are only a dozen or so Pubyok left, old men with silver crewcuts who walk in a row like a wall and truly believe they can float, stealthy as ghosts, from one citizen to the next, interrogating them as a wind interrogates the leaves. They are constantly breaking their hands, on the principle that the bones grow back stronger, knitting in extra layers. It is a terrible thing to see, old men, out of nowhere, cracking their hands on doorjambs or the rims of fire barrels. The Pubyok all gather ’round when one is about to break a hand, and the rest of us, the thinking, principled remainder of Division 42, have to look away. Junbi, they say, almost softly, then count hana, dul, set and shout Sijak! Then there’s the weirdly dead sound of a hand striking the edge of a car door. The Pubyok believe that all subjects arriving at Division 42 should be met with brutality right away—senseless, extended, old-fashioned hurt.

  And then there is my team—correction: our team, for it truly is a group effort. We have no need for a nickname, and sharp minds are our only interrogation tools. The Pubyok experienced either the war or its aftermath when they were young, and their ways are understandable. We pay respect to them, but interrogation is a science now, and long-term, consistent results are what matter. Thuggery has its place, we concede, but it should come tactically, at specific moments, over a long relationship. And pain—that towering white flower—can only be used once the way we apply it, complete, enduring, transformational pain, without cloak or guise. And since everyone on our team is a graduate of Kim Il Sung University, we have a soft spot for old professors, even our sad candidate from a regional college down in Kaesong.

  In an interrogation bay, we reclined our professor into one of the Q & A chairs, which are amazingly comfortable. We have a contractor in Syria who makes them for us—they’re similar to dental chairs, with baby-blue leather and arm- and headrests. There’s a machine next to the chair, though, that makes people nervous. It’s called an autopilot. I suppose that’s our only other tool.

  “I thought you had all you needed to know,” the professor said. “I answered the questions.”

  “You were wonderful,” we told him. “Absolutely.”

  Then we showed him the biography we’d made of his life. At 212 pages, it was the product of dozens of hours of interviews. It contained all of him, from his earliest memories—Party education, defining personal moments, achievements and failures, affairs with students, and so on, a complete documentation of his existence, right to his arrival at Division 42. He flipped through the book, impressed. We use a binding machine, the kind that seals the spines of doctoral dissertations, and it gives the biographies a real professional look. The Pubyok simply beat you until you confess to using a radio, whether there’s a radio or not. Our team discovers an entire life, with all its subtleties and motivations, and then crafts it into a single, original volume that contains the person himself. When you have a subject’s biography, there is nothing between the citizen and the state. That’s harmony, that’s the idea our nation is founded upon. Sure, some of our subject’s stories are sweeping and take months to record, but if there’s one commodity we have no shortage of in North Korea, it’s forever.

  We hooked the professor up to the autopilot, and he looked quite surprised when the pain delivery began. The expression on his face conveyed a desperation to determine what we wanted from him, and how he could give it, but the biography was complete, there were no more questions. The professor watched in horror as I reached across his body to his shirt pocket, where I removed a gold pen clipped there—such an object can concentrate the electrical current, setting the clothes on fire. The professor’s eyes—they understood now that he was no longer a professor, that he would never have need of a pen again. It wasn’t long ago, when we were young, that people like the professor, probably with a handful of his students, would be shot in the soccer stadium on a Monday morning before work. While we were in college, the big trend was to throw them all into the prison mines, where life expectancy is six months. And of course now organ harvesting is where so many of our subjects meet their end.

  It’s true that when the mines open their maw for more workers, everyone must go, we have no say over that. But people like the professor, we believe, have an entire life of happiness and labor to offer our nation. So we ramp up the pain to inconceivable levels, a shifting, muscular river of pain. Pain of this nature creates a rift in the identity—the person who makes it to the far shore will have little resemblance to the professor who now begins the crossing. In a few weeks, he will be a contributing member of a rural farm collective, and perhaps we can even find a widow to comfort him. There’s no way around it: to get a new life, you’ve got to trade in your old one.

  For now, it was our little professor’s alone time. We set the autopilot, which monitors all of a subject’s vitals and brings the pain in modulated waves, and then we closed the soundproof door and made for the library. We’d see the professor again this afternoon, pupils dilated, teeth chattering, and help him step into his street clothes for the big trip to the countryside.

  Our library, of course, is really just a storeroom, but each time our team delivers a new biography, I like to do it with some ceremony. Again, my apologies for using that regrettable pronoun “I.” I try not to bring it to work with me. Shelves line the walls, floor to ceiling, and fill the room in freestanding rows. In a society where it is the collective that matters, we’re the only people who make the individuals count. No matter what happens to our subjects after we interrogate them, we still have them here. We’ve saved them all. The irony of course is that the average citizen, the average interrogator walking the street, for instance, never gets his story told. Nobody asks him his favorite Sun Moon movie, nobody wants to know does he prefer millet cakes or millet porridge. No, in a cruel twist, it’s only enemies of the state that get this kind of star treatment.

  With a little fanfare, we placed the professor’s biography on the shelf, right next to the girl dancer from last week. She had us all weeping as she described how her little brother lost his eyes, and when the moment came to apply the autopilot to her, the pain made her limbs rise and sweep the air in rhythmic, graceful gestures, as if she were telling her story one last time through movement. You can see that “interrogation” isn’t even the right word for what we do—it’s a clumsy holdover from the Pubyok era. When the last Pubyok finally retires, we will lobby to have our name changed to Division of Citizen Biographies.

  Our interns, Q-Kee and Jujack, returned out of breath.

  “A team of Pubyok are there,” Q-Kee said.

  “They got to Commander Ga first,” Jujack added.

  We raced upstairs. When we got to the holding room, Sarge and some of his guys were just leaving. Sarge was the leader of the Pubyok, and there was no love lost between us. His forehead was prominent, and even in his seventies, he had the body of an ape. Sarge was what we called him. I never knew his real name.

  He stood in the doorway, rubbing one hand in the other.

  “Impersonating a national hero,” Sarge said, shaking his head. “What’s our nation coming to? Is there any honor left at all?”

  There were some marks on Sarge’s face, and as he spoke blood trickled from his nose.

  Q-Kee touched her own nose. “Looks like Commander Ga got the best of you guys.”

  That girl Q-Kee—what cheek!

  “It’s not Commander Ga,” Sarge said. “But, yeah, he had a nifty little trick he pulled on us. We’re sending him down to the sump tonight. We’ll show him some tricks of our own.”

  “But what about his biography?” we asked.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Sarge asked. “It’s not Commander Ga. The guy’s an imposter.”

  “Then you won’t mind if our team tries its hand. We’re only after the truth.”

  “The truth isn’t in your silly books,” Sarge said. “It’s something you can see in a man
’s eyes. You can feel it here, in your heart.”

  Personally, I felt bad for Sarge. He was an old man, of large stature. To have that kind of size meant you’d eaten meat as a child, something that would most likely come from collaborating with the Japanese. Whether he’d cozied up to the Japs or not, everyone he’d met, over his whole life, probably suspected he had.

  “But yeah, the guy’s all yours,” Sarge said. “After all, what are we without honor?” he added, but he said the word “we” in a way that didn’t include us. He started to walk away, but then turned back. “Don’t let him near the light switch,” he warned.

  Inside, we found Commander Ga in a chair. The Pubyok had done a number on him, and he certainly didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d led assassination missions into the South to silence loudmouth defectors. He looked us over, trying to decide whether we meant to beat him as well, though he didn’t seem inclined to offer any defense if we did.

  His busted lips looked pitiful, and his reddened ears were filling with fluid from being slapped with the soles of dress shoes. We could see old frostbite marks on his fingers, and his shirt had been torn off, revealing a tattoo on his chest of the actress Sun Moon. We shook our heads. Poor Sun Moon. There was also a large scar on his arm, though the rumors that Commander Ga had wrestled a bear were just that, rumors. In his rucksack, we found only a pair of black cowboy boots, a single can of peaches, and a bright red cell phone, battery dead.

  “We’re here for your story,” we told him.

  His face was still ringing from Pubyok fists.

  “I hope you like happy endings,” he said.

  We helped him to an interrogation bay and into his own Q & A chair. We gave him aspirin and a cup of water, and soon he was asleep.

  We scribbled off a quick note that said, “Is not Commander Ga.” This we placed in a vacuum tube and, with a whoosh, sent it deep into the bunker complex below us, where all the decisions were made. How deep the bunker went and who exactly was down there, we didn’t know. The deeper the better was how I felt. I mean we felt.

  Before we’d even turned to go, the vacuum tube had raced back and dropped into our hopper. When we opened it, the note inside read simply, “Is Commander Ga.”

  It was only at the very end of the day, when we were about to hang up our smocks, that we returned to him. The swelling had started on the face of Commander Ga, or whoever he was, though there was something peaceful about his sleep. We noticed that his hands rested on his stomach, and they seemed to be typing, as if he were transcribing the dream he was having. We stared at his fingers awhile but could make no sense of what he might be writing.

  “We’re not the ones who hurt you,” we said when we woke him. “That was the work of another party. Answer a simple question for us, and we’ll get you a room, a comfortable bed.”

  Commander Ga nodded. There were so many questions we were dying to ask him.

  But then our intern Q-Kee suddenly spoke up. “What did you do with the actress’s body?” she blurted out. “Where did you hide it?”

  We took Q-Kee by the shoulder and led her out of the interrogation bay. She was the first female intern in the history of Division 42, and boy, was she a firebrand. The Pubyok were beside themselves that a woman was in the building, but to have a modern, forward-thinking interrogation division, a female interrogator was going to be essential.

  “Start slow,” we told Q-Kee. “We’re building a relationship here. We don’t want to put him on the defensive. If we earn his trust, he’ll practically write his story for us.”

  “Who cares about the biography?” she asked. “Once we find out the location of the dead actress and her kids, they’ll shoot him in the street. End of story.”

  “Character is destiny,” we told her, reminding her of the famous quote from Kim Il Sung. “That means that once we discover the inside of a subject, what makes him tick, we not only know everything he’s done but everything he will do.”

  Back in the interrogation bay, Q-Kee reluctantly asked a more appropriate question.

  “How did you first meet the actress Sun Moon?” she asked.

  Commander Ga closed his eyes. “So cold,” he said. “She was on the side of the infirmary. The infirmary was white. The snow fell heavily, it blocked my view of her. The battleship burned. They used the infirmary because it was white. Inside, people moaned. The water was on fire.”

  “He’s worthless,” Q-Kee muttered.

  She was right. It had been a long day. Up top, on ground level, the rust-colored light of afternoon would be stretching long now through downtown Pyongyang. It was time to call it quits and get home before the power went out.

  “Wait,” Jujack said. “Just give us something, Commander Ga.”

  The subject seemed to like being called Commander Ga.

  Jujack went on, “Just tell us what you were dreaming about. Then we’ll take you to a room.”

  “I was driving a car,” Commander Ga said. “An American car.”

  “Yes,” Jujack said. “Keep going. Have you really driven an American car?”

  Jujack was one fine intern—he was the first minister’s boy who’d ever been worth a damn.

  “I have,” Commander Ga said.

  “Why not start there, why not tell us about driving an American car?”

  Slowly, he began to speak. “It’s nighttime,” he said. “My hand shifts through the gears. The streetlights are off, electric buses are crammed with third-shift factory workers, silently racing down Chollima Street and Reunification Boulevard. Sun Moon is in the car with me. I don’t know Pyongyang. Left, she says. Right. We are driving to her house, across the river, on the heights of Mount Taesong. In the dream, I believe that this night will be different, that when we arrive home she will finally let me touch her. She is wearing a platinum choson-ot, shimmery as crushed diamonds. On the streets, people in black pajamas dart into our path, people carrying bundles and groceries and extra work to take home, but I do not slow. I am Commander Ga in the dream. My whole life, I’ve been steered by others, I’ve been the one trying to escape from their paths. But Commander Ga, he is a man who steps on the gas.”

  “In the dream, have you just become Commander Ga?” we asked him.

  But he kept going, as if he didn’t hear us. “We cut through Mansu Park, mist from the river. In the woods, families are stealing chestnuts from the trees—the children running through the branches, kicking the nuts down to parents who crack them open between rocks. Once you spotted a yellow or blue bucket, they all came into focus—once your eyes adjusted they were everywhere, families risking prison to steal nuts from public parks. Are they playing some kind of game? Sun Moon asked me. They are so amusing, up in the trees in their white bedclothes. Or maybe it’s athletics they’re performing. You know, gymnastics. It’s such a treat, this kind of surprise. What a fine movie it would make—a family of circus performers who practice in the trees of a public park at night. They must practice in secret because a rival circus family is always stealing their tricks. Can’t you just picture this movie, she asked me, up on the screen? The moment was so perfect. I would’ve driven off the bridge and killed us both to make that moment last forever, such was my love for Sun Moon, a woman who was so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

  The five of us stood there in awe of the story. Commander Ga had certainly earned his sedative. I gave Q-Kee a look that said, Now do you understand the subtle art of interrogation?

  You shouldn’t be in this business if you don’t find your subjects endlessly interesting. If all you want to do is rough them up. We determined that Ga was the type to tend his own wounds, so we locked him in a room with some disinfectant and a bandage. Then we traded our smocks for vinalon coats and discussed his case as we reclined on the steep escalators that led down into the Pyongyang Metro. Notice how our subject’s identity shift is near total—the imposter even dreams he is Commander Ga. Notice, too, how he began his story as a love story might
open, with beauty and an insight that combined pity with the need to protect. He does not start his story by admitting where he really got this American car. He does not mention that they are driving home from a party, hosted by Kim Jong Il, where Ga was assaulted for the amusement of the guests. It slips his mind that he has somehow disposed of the husband of this woman he “loves.”

  Yes, we know a few of the facts of Ga’s story, the outside of it, if you will. The rumors had been swirling around the capital for weeks. It was the inside we’d have to discover. I could already tell this would be the biggest, most important biography we’d ever write. I could already picture the cover of Commander Ga’s biography. I could imagine the subject’s true name, whatever that would turn out to be, embossed on the spine. Mentally, I had already finished that book. I was already placing that book on a shelf and turning out the lights and then closing the door to a room where the dust snowed through the darkness at a rate of three millimeters per decade.

  The library is a sacred place to us. No visitors are allowed, and once a book is closed, it never gets opened. Oh, sure, sometimes the boys from Propaganda will nose around for a feel-good story to play to the citizens over the loudspeakers, but we’re story takers, not storytellers. We’re a far cry from the old veterans who spin weepers to passersby in front of the Respect for Elders Retirement Home on Moranbong Street.

  The Kwangbok station, with its beautiful mural of Lake Samji, is my stop. The city is filled with wood smoke when I emerge from the subway into my Pottongang neighborhood. An old woman is grilling green-onion tails on the sidewalk, and I catch the traffic girl switching her blue sunglasses for an amber-tinted nighttime pair. On the streets, I barter the professor’s gold pen for cucumbers, a kilo of U.N. rice, and some sesame paste. Apartment lights come to life above us as we bargain, and you can see that no one lives above the ninth floor of their apartment buildings. The elevators never work, and if they do, the power’s bound to go out when you’re between floors and trap you in a shaft. My building’s called the Glory of Mount Paektu, and I’m the sole occupant of the twenty-second floor, a height that makes sure my elderly parents never go out unattended. It doesn’t take as long as you’d think to climb the stairs—a person can get used to anything.