The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  “I don’t think he’s anybody’s,” Sarge said.

  “That shit he said about Duc Dan,” I said, “you know that’s just a subject lying to survive. Duc Dan’s building sandcastles in Wonsan right now.”

  “He wouldn’t take it back,” Sarge said. “No matter how much juice we put in that asshole’s brain, he wouldn’t take it back.” Sarge looked up at me for the first time. “Why doesn’t Duc Dan ever write? All these years, not one of them has ever dropped a line to their old Pubyok unit.”

  I lit a cigarette and handed it to Sarge. “Promise me that when you’re on the beach, you won’t ever think about this place again,” I told him. “And don’t ever let a subject get inside your head. You taught me that. Remember how green I was?”

  Sarge half smiled. “Still are,” he said.

  I clapped him on the back and mimed a punch to the metal doorframe.

  Sarge shook his head and laughed.

  “We’ll get this guy,” I said, and walked away.

  You can’t believe how fast I can take a couple of staircases.

  “Ga’s still in play,” I said when I burst through the door.

  The team was only on its second cigarette. They all looked up.

  “They didn’t get anything,” I told them. “He’s ours now.”

  We looked at Commander Ga, mouth hanging open, as useful as a lychee nut.

  Rations be damned, Leonardo lit a celebratory third cigarette. “We’ve got a few days till he gets his wits back,” he said. “Assuming there aren’t any memory-recovery issues. In the meantime, we should go out into the field, search the actress’s house, see what we can dig up.”

  Q-Kee spoke up. “The subject responded to a mother figure in a captive environment. Is there any way we can get our hands on an older female interrogator, someone Mongnan’s age, someone that might get through to him?”

  “Mongnan,” Ga echoed, staring straight ahead.

  I shook my head no. There was no such animal.

  It was true how much we were at a disadvantage for not having female interrogators. Vietnam was a pioneer in that department, and look at the great strides made by nations like Chechnya and Yemen. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka used women exclusively for this purpose.

  Jujack jumped in. “Why don’t we bring Mongnan down here, put an extra bed in this room, and just record them for a week? I bet it would all come out.”

  Commander Ga seemed to notice us just then. “Mongnan’s dead,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” we told him. “No need to worry. She’s probably just fine.”

  “No,” he said. “I saw her name.”

  “Where?” we asked.

  “On the master computer.”

  We were all seated around Commander Ga, like family. We weren’t supposed to tell him, but we did. “There’s no such thing as a master computer,” we said. “It’s a device, invented by us, to get people to reveal critical information. They’re told that the computer has the location of everybody in Korea, North and South, and that as a reward for telling their stories, they get to enter a list of people they want to find. Do you understand us, Commander Ga? The computer has no addresses in it. It just saves the names that are typed in, so that we know everybody the subject cares about and then we can arrest them.”

  It kind of looked like some of that was sinking in, like Ga was coming around a little.

  “My question,” he said.

  We did owe him the answer to a question.

  At the Academy, they had an old adage about electricity therapy: “Voltage closes the attic but opens the cellar,” meaning that it tends to disrupt a subject’s working memory but leaves deep impressions intact and surprisingly easy to access. So maybe, if Ga was lucid enough, we had an opportunity. We’d take what we could get.

  “Tell us your oldest memory,” we said, “and then you get your question.”

  Ga began as the lobotomized begin, without calculation or consideration, speaking in a voice that was lifeless and rote:

  “I was a boy,” he said. “And I went for a long walk and got lost. My parents were dreamers and didn’t notice I was gone. They came to look for me but it was too late—I had wandered too far. A cold wind rose and said, ‘Come, little boy, sleep in my floating white sheets,’ and I thought, Now I will freeze to death. I ran to escape the wind, and a mine shaft said, ‘Come, shelter yourself in my depths,’ and I thought, Now I will fall down to death. I ran into the fields where the filth is thrown and the sick are left. There, a ghost said, ‘Let me inside, and I’ll warm you from within,’ and I thought, Now I will die of fever. Then a bear came and spoke to me, but I did not know his language. I ran into the woods and the bear followed me, and I thought, Now I will be eaten to death. The bear took me in his strong arm and held me close to his face. He used his great claws to comb my hair. He dipped his paw in honey and brought his claws to my lips. Then the bear said, ‘You will learn to speak bear now, and you will become as the bear and you will be safe.’ ”

  Everybody recognized the story, one that’s taught to all the orphans, with the bear representing the eternal love of Kim Jong Il. So Commander Ga was an orphan. We shook our heads at the revelation. And it gave us chills the way he told the story, as if it actually was about him and not a character he had learned about, as if he personally had nearly died of cold, hunger, fever, and mine mishaps, as if he himself had licked honey from the Dear Leader’s claws. But such is the universal power of storytelling.

  “My question?” Ga asked.

  “Of course,” we told him. “Ask away.”

  Commander Ga pointed at the can of peaches on his bedside table. “Are those my peaches?” he asked. “Or your peaches or Comrade Buc’s?”

  Suddenly, we were quiet. We leaned in close.

  “Who’s Comrade Buc?” we asked.

  “Comrade Buc,” Ga said, looking into each of our faces, as if we were Comrade Buc. “Forgive me for what I did to you, I’m sorry about your scar.”

  Ga’s eyes lost focus, then his head went back to the pillow. He felt cold, but when we checked his temperature again, it was normal—electricity can really throw off a body’s thermal regulation. When we were sure it was just exhaustion, Jujack motioned us to the corner of the room, where he spoke in a hushed tone.

  “I know that name, Comrade Buc,” Jujack said. “I just saw it on an ankle bracelet, down in the sump.”

  That’s when we lit a cigarette, placed it in Commander Ga’s lips, and then began gearing up for another trip beneath the torture complex.

  WHEN THE interrogators had left, Commander Ga lay in the dark, smoking. In pain school, they’d taught him to find his reserve, a private place he could go in unbearable moments. A pain reserve was like a real reserve—you put a fence around it, attended to its welfare, kept it pristine, and dealt with all trespassers. Nobody could ever know what your pain reserve was, even if you’d chosen the most obvious, rudimentary element of your life, because if you lost your pain reserve, you’d lost everything.

  In prison, when rocks smashed his hands or a baton came down on the back of his neck, he’d attempt to transport himself to the deck of the Junma and its gentle rolling motion. When the cold made his fingers staticky with pain, he tried to get inside the opera diva’s song, to enter her voice itself. He tried to veil himself in the yellow of the Second Mate’s wife’s dress or pull the cloak of an American quilt over his head, but none of them really worked. It was only when he’d seen Sun Moon’s movie that he finally had a reserve—she saved him from everything. When his pickax struck frozen rock, in that spark, he felt her aliveness. When a wall of ore dust would sweep through a passage and double him over with cough, she gave him breath. When once he stepped in an electrified puddle, Sun Moon appeared and restarted his heart.

  So it was that today, when the old Pubyok of Division 42 fitted him with the halo, he turned to her. Even before they’d fastened the thumbscrews to his scalp, he’d taken leave of them and was returning to th
e first day he’d physically stood in the presence of Sun Moon. He didn’t believe that he might actually meet her until he’d made it out of the gates of Prison 33, until the Warden called for the guards to open the gate, and he stepped through its razor-wire threshold and then heard the gate slide shut behind him. He was wearing Commander Ga’s uniform and was holding the box of photographs Mongnan had given him. In his pocket was the camera he’d watched over and a long-guarded DVD of Casablanca. Armed with these things, he walked through the mud to the car that would take him to her.

  As he stepped into the Mercedes, the driver turned to him, shock and confusion on his face.

  Commander Ga could see a thermos on the dashboard. A year without tea.

  “I could use a cup of tea,” he said.

  The driver didn’t move. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  “Are you a homosexual?” was Commander Ga’s answer.

  The driver stared at him in disbelief, then shook his head.

  “Are you sure? Have you been tested?”

  “Yes,” the driver said, confused. Then he said, “No.”

  “Get out,” Commander Ga said. “I’m Commander Ga now. That other man is gone. If you think you belong with him, I can take you to him, what’s left of him, down in the mine. Because you’re either his driver or my driver. If you’re my driver, you’ll pour me a cup of tea, get me to a civilized place where I can bathe. Then you’ll take me home.”

  “Home?”

  “Home to my wife, the actress Sun Moon.”

  And then Ga was being driven to Sun Moon, the only person who could take away the pain he’d suffered in getting to her. A crow towed their Mercedes through the mountain roads, and in the backseat Ga looked through the box Mongnan had given him. It contained thousands of pictures. Mongnan had clipped together inmates’ entrance and exit photos. Back to back, alive and dead, thousands of people. He flipped through the box so that all the exit images faced him—bodies crushed and torn and folded in unnatural angles. He recognized victims of cave-ins and beatings. In some pictures, he couldn’t tell exactly what he was looking at. Mostly, the dead looked as if they’d gone to sleep, and children, because it was the cold that got them, were curled up in hard little discs, like lozenges. Mongnan was meticulous, and the catalog was complete. This box, he suddenly understood, was the closest thing his nation had to the phone book he’d seen in Texas.

  He spun the box around, and now facing him were all the entrance photos, in which people were fearful and uncertain and hadn’t quite let themselves imagine the nightmare they were in for, and these photos were even harder to look at. When at last he located his own entrance photo, he turned it slowly, seriously expecting to see himself dead. But it wasn’t so. He took a moment to marvel at that. He studied the light in the trees as they flashed by. He watched the motion of the crow ahead, its tow chain tinkling with slackness before snapping taut. He remembered the eggshells spinning whimsically in the crow that had brought him. In his photo, you couldn’t see the dying people on cots around him. You couldn’t see his hands dripping with bloody ice water. But the eyes—it’s unmistakable how they are wide yet refusing to see what is before them. Such a boy he seems, as if he’s still back in an orphanage, believing that all is well and that the fate which befalls all the orphan boys won’t befall him. The chalk name on the slate he held seemed so foreign. Here was the only photo of that person, the person he used to be. He tore it slowly into strips before letting them flutter out the window.

  The crow unhitched them in the outskirts of Pyongyang, and at the Koryo Hotel, the girls gave him Commander Ga’s usual treatment—the deep soaking and cleansing he sought after every visit to a prison mine. His uniform was cleaned and pressed, and he was bathed in a grand tub, where the girls scrubbed the blood stains from his hands and tried to repair his nails, and they didn’t care whose blood it was that tinted the soapy water, his or Commander Ga’s or someone else’s. In the warm, buoyant water he came to see that at some point in the last year, his mind and his flesh had separated, that his brain had sat high and frightened above the mule of his body, a beast of burden that hopefully would make it alone over the treacherous mountain pass of Prison 33. But now as a woman ran a warm washcloth along the arch of his foot, the sensation was allowed to rise up, up into his brain, and it was okay to perceive again, to recognize forgotten parts of his body as they hailed him. His lungs were more than air bellows. His heart, he believed now, could do more than move blood.

  He tried to imagine the woman he was about to behold. He understood that the real Sun Moon couldn’t be as beautiful as the one on the screen, the way her skin glowed, the radiance of her smile. And the particular way her desires took up residence about the eyes—it must be a product of projection, of some cinematic effect. He wanted to be intimate with her, to harbor no secrets, to have nothing between them. Seeing her projected on the wall of the infirmary, that’s how it had felt, that there was no snow or cold between them, that she was right there with him, a woman who’d given everything, who’d abandoned her freedom and entered Prison 33 to save him. It had been a mistake to wait until the last moment to tell the Second Mate’s wife about the replacement husbands that awaited her, Ga could see that now. So there was no way he was going to let a secret spoil things with Sun Moon. That was the great thing about their relationship: a new beginning, a chance to unburden all. What the Captain had said of getting his wife back would be true of him and Sun Moon as well: they’d be strangers for a while, there would be a period of discovery, but love, love would eventually return.

  The women of the Koryo Hotel toweled him, dressed him. Finally, he took a number 7 haircut—the one they called Speed Battle, the Commander’s signature style.

  In the late afternoon, the Mercedes climbed the final, winding road that led to the peak of Mount Taesong. They passed the botanical gardens, the national seed bank, and the hothouses that contained the breeding stocks of kimilsungia and kimjongilia. They passed the Pyongyang Central Zoo, closed at this hour. On the seat beside him were some of Commander Ga’s possessions. There was a bottle of cologne, and he quickly applied some. This is the smell of me, he thought. He picked up Commander Ga’s pistol. This is my pistol, he thought. He pulled back the slide enough to see a bullet peek from the breech. I am the kind of man who keeps one in the chamber.

  Finally, they passed a cemetery whose bronze-busted tombstones glowed orange in the light. This was the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery, whose 114 occupants, all of whom had died before they could engender sons, gave names to every orphan in the nation. They reached the peak and here were three houses built for the ministers of Mass Mobilization, Prison Mines, and Procurement.

  The driver came to a stop before the middle house, and Commander Ga walked through the gate himself, its low slats woven with cucumber vines and the blossoms of a magnificent melon. Nearing Sun Moon’s door, he felt his chest tighten with pain, the pain of the Captain pressing him with inky needles, of the saltwater he splashed on the raw tattoo, of the Second Mate’s wife weeping the infection out with a steaming towel. At the door, he took that breath, and knocked.

  Almost immediately, Sun Moon answered. She wore a loose house robe, under which her breasts swung free. He’d seen such a house robe only once before, in Texas, hanging in the bath of his guest room. That robe was white and fluffy, while Sun Moon’s was matted and stained with old sauces. She was without makeup, and her hair was down, falling across her shoulders. Her face was filled with excitement and possibility and, suddenly, he felt the terrible violence of this day leave him. Gone was the combat he’d faced at the hands of her husband. Gone was the look of doom on the Warden’s face. Wiped away were the multitudes Mongnan had captured on film. This house was a good house, white paint, red trim. It was the opposite of the Canning Master’s house—nothing bad had happened here, he could tell.

  “I’m home,” he said to her.

  She looked past him, peering around the yard, the road.
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  “Do you have a package for me?” she asked. “Did the studio send you?”

  But here she paused, taking in all the inconsistencies—the lean stranger in her husband’s uniform, the man wearing his cologne and riding in his car.

  “Who are you supposed to be?” she asked.

  “I’m Commander Ga,” he said. “And I’m finally home.”

  “You’re telling me you’ve brought no script, nothing?” she asked. “You mean the studio dressed you up like this and sent you all the way up here, and you don’t have a script for me? You tell Dak-Ho I said that’s cold, even for him. He’s crossed a line.”

  “I don’t know who Dak-Ho is,” he said and marveled at the evenness of her skin, at the way her dark eyes locked on him. “You’re even more beautiful than I imagined.”

  She undid the belt of her house robe, then recinched it tighter.

  Then she lifted her hands to the heavens. “Why do we live on this godforsaken hill?” she asked the sky. “Why am I up here, when everything that matters is down there?” She pointed to Pyongyang far below, this time of day just a haze of buildings lining the silver Y of the Taedong River. She approached him and looked up into his eyes. “Why can’t we live by Mansu Park? I could take an express bus to the studio from there. How can you pretend not to know who Dak-Ho is? Everybody knows him. Has he sent you here to mock me? Are they all down there laughing at me?”

  “I can tell you’ve been hurting for a long time,” he said. “But that’s all over now. Your husband’s home.”

  “You’re the worst actor in the world,” she said. “They’re all down there at a casting party, aren’t they? They’re drunk and laughing and casting a new female lead, and they decided to send the worst actor in the world up the hill to mock me.”

  She fell down to the grass and placed the back of her hand against her forehead. “Go on, get out of here. You’ve had your fun. Go tell Dak-Ho how the old actress wept.” She tried to wipe her eyes. Then, from her house robe, she produced a pack of cigarettes. She brazenly lit one—it made her look mannish and seductive. “Not a single script, an entire year without a script.”