The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  My father said to me, “I denounce this boy for having a blue tongue.”

  We laughed.

  I pointed at my father. “This citizen eats mustard.”

  I had recently tried mustard root for the first time, and the look on my face made my parents laugh. Everything mustard was now funny to me.

  My father addressed an invisible authority in the air. “This boy has counterrevolutionary thoughts about mustard. He should be sent to a mustard-seed farm to correct his mustardy thinking.”

  “This dad eats pickle ice with mustard poop,” I said.

  “That was a good one. Now take my hand,” he told me. I put my small hand in his, and then his mouth became sharp with hate. He shouted, “I denounce this citizen as an imperialist puppet who should be remanded to stand trial for crimes against the state.” His face was red, venomous. “I have witnessed him spew capitalist diatribes in an effort to poison our minds with his traitorous filth.”

  The old men turned from their game to observe us.

  I was terrified, on the verge of crying. My father said, “See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If your mother ever must say something like that to me, in order to protect the two of you, know that inside, she and I are holding hands. And if someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it’s not really you. That’s inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.”

  He reached out and ruffled my hair.

  It was the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep. I’d try to sleep, but I’d just lie on my cot puzzling over how Commander Ga had managed to change his life and become someone else. With no record of who he’d been. How do you escape your Party Aptitude Test score or elude twelve years of your teachers’ Rightness of Thinking evaluations? I could sense that Ga’s hidden history was chaptered with friends and adventures, and I was jealous of that. It didn’t matter to me that he had probably killed the woman he loved. How had he found love itself? How had he pulled that off? And had love made him become someone else, or, as I suspected, had love suddenly appeared once he took on a new identity? I suspected that Ga was the same person on the inside but had a whole new exterior. I could respect that. But wouldn’t the real change be, if a person was to go all the way, to get a new inner life?

  There wasn’t even a file for this Commander Ga character—I only had Comrade Buc’s. I’d toss and turn for a while, wondering how Ga was so at peace, and then I’d relight my candle and pore over Buc’s file. I could tell my parents were awake, lying perfectly still, breathing evenly, listening to me as I rifled Comrade Buc’s file for any insight into Ga’s identity. I was jealous for the first time of the Pubyok, of their ability to get answers.

  And then there came a single clear sound from the phone. Bing, it rang.

  I heard the creak of canvas as my parents stiffened in their cots.

  The phone on the table began to blink with a bright green light.

  I took the phone in my hands and opened it. On its little screen was an image, a photo of a sidewalk, and set in the pavement was a star and in the star were two words in English, “Ingrid” and “Bergman.” It was daylight where this photo was taken.

  I turned again to Comrade Buc’s file, looking for any images that might contain such a star. There were all the standard photos—his Party commission, receiving his Kim Il Sung pin at sixteen, his oath of eternal affiliation. I flipped to the photo of his dead family, heads thrown back, contorted on the floor. And yet so pure. The girls in their white dresses. The mother draping an arm over the older girls while holding the hand of the youngest. I felt a pang at the sight of her wedding ring. It must have been a hard time for them, their father newly arrested, and here at some formal family moment without him, they succumbed to “possibly carbon monoxide.” It’s hard to imagine losing a family, to have someone you love just disappear like that. I understood better now why Buc had warned us in the sump to be ready, to have a plan in place. I listened to the silence of my parents in that dark room, and I wondered if I shouldn’t have a plan in place for when I lost one of them, if that’s what Buc meant.

  Because Comrade Buc’s family was clustered on the floor, the eye was naturally drawn there. For the first time I noticed that sitting on the table above them was a can of peaches, a small detail in relation to the entire photo. The can’s jagged lid was bent back, and I understood then that the method Commander Ga would use to excuse himself from the rest of his biography, whenever he felt like it, was sitting on his bedside table.

  At Division 42, a strip of light was shining underneath the door to the Pubyok lounge. I slipped quietly past—with those guys, you never knew if they were staying late or arriving early.

  I found Commander Ga sleeping peacefully, but his can of peaches was gone.

  I shook him awake. “Where are the peaches?” I asked him.

  He rubbed his face, ran a hand through his hair. “Is it day or night?” he asked.

  “Night.”

  He nodded. “Feels like night.”

  “Peaches,” I said. “Is that what you fed to the actress and her kids? Is that how you killed them?”

  Ga turned to his table. It was empty. “Where are my peaches?” he asked me. “Those are special peaches. You’ve got to get them back before something terrible happens.”

  Just then, I saw Q-Kee walk past in the hall. It was three thirty in the morning! The shock-work whistles wouldn’t blow for another two hours. I called to her, but she kept going.

  I turned to Ga. “You want to tell me what a Bergman is?”

  “A Bergman?” he asked. “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “How about an Ingrid?”

  “There’s no such word,” he said.

  I stared at him a moment. “Did you love her?”

  “I still love her.”

  “But how?” I asked him. “How did you get her to love you back?”

  “Intimacy.”

  “Intimacy? What is that?”

  “It’s when two people share everything, when there are no secrets between them.”

  I had to laugh. “No secrets?” I asked him. “It’s not possible. We spend weeks extracting entire biographies from subjects, and always when we hook them up to the autopilot, they blurt out some crucial detail we’d missed. So getting every secret out of someone, sorry, it’s just not possible.”

  “No,” Ga said. “She gives you her secrets. And you give her yours.”

  I saw Q-Kee walk past again, this time she was wearing a headlamp. I left Ga to catch up with her—she had a hallway-length lead on me. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” I called to her.

  Echoing through the halls, I heard her answer, “I’m dedicated.”

  I caught up with her in the stairwell, but she wasn’t slowing. In her hands, she had a device from the shop, a hand pump connected to a section of rubber tubing. It’s used to irrigate and drain a subject’s stomach—organ swelling from force-induced fluids being the third most painful of all coercion tactics.

  “Where are you going with that?” I asked.

  Flight after flight, we spiraled deeper into the building.

  “I don’t have time,” she said.

  I grabbed her hard by the elbow and spun her. She didn’t look used to that treatment.

  “I made a mistake,” she said. “But really, we have to hurry.”

  Down two more flights, we came to the sump and the hatch was open.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”

  She disappeared down the ladder, and when I followed, I could see Comrade Buc writhing on the floor, a spilled can of peaches beside him. Q-Kee was fighting his convulsions to get the tube down his throat. Black saliva streamed from his mouth, his eyes were drooping, sure signs of botulism poisoning.

  “Forget it,” I said. “The toxin’s already in his nervous system.”

  She grunted in frustration. “I know, I screwed up,” she said.

>   “Go on.”

  “I shouldn’t have, I know,” she said. “It’s just that, he knows everything.”

  “Knew.”

  “Yes, knew.” She looked like she wanted to kick Buc’s shuddering body. “I thought if I could take a crack at him, then we’d figure this whole thing out. I came down here and asked him what he wanted, and he told me peaches. He said it was the last thing he wanted on earth.” Then she did kick him, but it seemed to bring no satisfaction. “He said if I brought him the peaches last night, he’d tell me everything in the morning.”

  “How did he know night from day?”

  She shook her head. “Another screwup. I told him.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “Every intern makes that mistake.”

  “But in the middle of the night,” she said, “I got this gut feeling something was wrong, so I came down to find him like this.”

  “We don’t work on gut feelings,” I said. “Pubyok do.”

  “Well, what did we get out of Buc? Basically nothing. What have we got from Commander Ga? A fucking fairy tale and how to jerk off an ox.”

  “Q-Kee,” I said. I put my hands on my hips and took a deep breath.

  “Don’t be mad at me,” she said. “You’re the one who asked Comrade Buc about canned peaches. You’re the one who told him Commander Ga was in the building. Buc just put two and two together.”

  She looked ready to storm off. “There’s one more thing,” she said. “Remember how Commander Ga asked whether those peaches were his or Comrade Buc’s? When I handed Comrade Buc the can of peaches, he asked me the same question.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “What did I tell him? Nothing,” she said. “I’m the interrogator, remember?”

  “Wrong,” I told her. “You’re the intern.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Interrogators are people who get results.”

  Behind the cells where new subjects are first processed is the central property locker. It’s on the main floor, and before leaving I went there to snoop around. Anything of real value was looted by the MPSS agents long before bringing the subjects in. Up and down the rows I studied the meager possessions that people were carrying before their final visit here. Lots of sandals. Enemies of the state tended to wear a size seven, was my initial observation. Here were the acorns from people’s pockets, the twigs they used to clean their teeth, rucksacks filled with rags and eating utensils. And next to a piece of tape bearing Comrade Buc’s name, I found a can of peaches with a red-and-green label, grown in Manpo, canned in Fruit Factory 49.

  I took the can of peaches and headed home.

  The subway had started running, and jammed in one of the cars, I looked no different than the legions of gray-clad factory workers as we involuntarily leaned against one another in the turns. I kept seeing Buc’s family, beautiful in their white dresses. I kept hoping my mother, cooking breakfast blind, didn’t burn the apartment down. Somehow she always managed not to. And even one hundred meters underground we all heard the shock-work whistle’s five morning blasts.

  COMMANDER GA’S eyes opened to see the boy and the girl at the foot of the bed, staring at him. They were really just the shine of first light in their hair, a thin blue across cheekbones. He blinked, and though it seemed like a second, he must have slept because when he opened his eyes again, the boy and the girl were gone.

  In the kitchen he found the chair balanced against the counter, and here they were, up high, staring into the open door of the top cabinet.

  He lit the burner under a carbon steel skillet, then quartered an onion and spooned in some oil.

  “How many guns are in there?” he asked them.

  The boy and the girl shared a look. The girl held up three fingers.

  “Has anyone shown you how to handle a pistol?”

  They shook their heads no.

  “Then you know not to touch them, right?”

  They nodded.

  The smell of cooking brought barking from the dog on the balcony.

  “Come, you two,” he said. “We need to find where your father keeps your mother’s cigarettes before she wakes mad as a dog in the zoo.”

  With Brando, Commander Ga scoured the house, toe-tapping the baseboards and inspecting the undersides of furniture. Brando sniffed and barked at everything he touched, while the children hung back, wary but curious. Ga didn’t know what he was looking for. He moved slowly from room to room, noticing a patched-over flue hole where an old heating stove had been. He observed a patch of swollen plaster, perhaps from a roof leak. Near the front door, he saw marks in the hardwood floor. He ran his toes over the scratches, then looked up.

  He fetched a chair, stood upon it, discovered a section of molding that was loose. He reached behind it, into the wall, and removed a carton of cigarettes.

  “Oh,” the boy said. “I understand now. You were looking for hiding places.”

  It was the first time the child had spoken to him.

  “That’s right,” he told the boy.

  “There’s another one,” the boy said. He pointed toward the portrait of Kim Jong Il.

  “I’m sending you on a secret mission,” Ga told them and handed over a pack of cigarettes. “You must get these cigarettes under your mother’s pillow, and she must not wake.”

  The girl’s expressions, in contrast to her mother’s, were subtle and easily missed. With a quick lip flare, she suggested this was much beneath her spying abilities, but still she accepted the mission.

  When the oversized portrait of the Dear Leader was removed, Commander Ga found an old shelf recessed in the wall. A laptop computer occupied most of it, but on the top shelves, he found a brick of American hundred-dollar bills, vitamin supplements, protein powder, and a vial of testosterone with two syringes.

  The onions had sweetened and clarified, turning black at the edges. He added an egg, a pinch of white pepper, celery leaves, and yesterday’s rice. The girl set out the plates and chili paste. The boy served. The mother emerged, half asleep, a lit cigarette in her lips. She came to the table, where the children suppressed knowing smiles.

  She took a drag and exhaled. “What?” she asked.

  Over breakfast, the girl asked, “Is it true that you went to America?”

  Ga nodded. They ate from Chinese plates with silver chopsticks.

  The boy said, “I heard you must pay for your food there.”

  “That’s true,” Ga said.

  “What about an apartment?” the girl asked. “Does that cost money?”

  “Or the bus,” the boy asked. “Or the zoo—does it cost to see the zoo?”

  Ga stopped them. “Nothing is free there.”

  “Not even the movies?” Sun Moon asked, a little offended.

  “Did you go to Disneyland?” the girl asked. “I heard that’s the best thing in America.”

  The boy said, “I heard American food tastes horrible.”

  Ga had three bites left, but he stopped, saving them for the dog.

  “The food’s good,” he answered. “But the Americans ruin everything with cheese. They make it out of animal milk. Americans put it on everything—on their eggs at breakfast, on their noodles, they melt it on ground meat. They say Americans smell like butter, but no, it is cheese. With heat, it becomes an orange liquid. For my work with the Dear Leader, I must help Korean chefs re-create cheese. All week, our team has been forced to handle it.”

  Sun Moon still had a little food left on her plate, but with the talk of the Dear Leader, she extinguished her cigarette in the rice.

  This was a signal that breakfast was over, but still the boy had one last question to ask. “Do dogs really have their own food in America, a kind that comes in cans?”

  The idea was shocking to Ga, a cannery dedicated to dogs. “Not that I saw,” he said.

  Over the next week, Commander Ga oversaw a team of chefs constructing the menu for the American delegation. Dak-Ho was enlisted to use props from the Centra
l Movie Lot to construct a Texas-style ranch, based on Ga’s drawings of the lodgepole corral, mesquite fences, branding hearth, and barn. A site was chosen east of Pyongyang, where there was more open space and fewer citizens. Comrade Buc acquired everything from patterns for guayabera shirts to cobbler molds for cowboy boots. Procuring a chuck wagon proved Buc’s greatest challenge, but one was located at a Japanese theme park, and a team was sent to get it.

  It was determined that a North Korean Weedwacker would not be engineered since tests showed that a communist scythe, with a 1.5-meter razor-sharp blade, was the more effective tool at clearing brush. A fishing pond was constructed and filled with eels from the Taedong River, a most voracious and worthy opponent for the sport of fishing. Teams of volunteer citizens were sent into the Sobaek Mountains to capture a score of rock mamushi, the nation’s most poisonous snake, for target practice.

  A group of stage mothers from the Children’s Palace Theater was enlisted to make the gift baskets. While calfskin could not be found for the making of gloves, the most supple replacement—puppy—was chosen. In place of bourbon, a potent snake whiskey from the hills of Hamhung was selected. The Junta in Burma donated five kilos of tiger jerky. Much debate was given to the topic of which cigarettes best bespoke the identity of the North Korean people. In the end, the brand was Prolot.

  But it wasn’t all work. Each day, Commander Ga took a long lunch at the Moranbong Theater, where, alone, he watched a different Sun Moon movie. He beheld her fierce resilience in Oppressors Tumble, felt her limitless capacity to suffer in Motherless Fatherland, understood her seductive guile from Glory of Glories, and went home whistling patriotic tunes after Hold the Banner High!