The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  “Condoms,” I repeated. All forms of birth control were strictly illegal.

  “You can get them at any night market,” she said. “The Chinese make them in every color.”

  She turned over Sun Moon’s bedside table, but there was nothing underneath.

  I turned over Commander Ga’s bedside table as well—nothing.

  “Trust me,” Q-Kee said. “The Commander had no need for birth control.”

  Together, we pulled the sheets from the bed and got down on our knees to identify hairs on the pillows. “They both slept here,” I declared, and then we ran our fingertips across each centimeter of the mattress, sniffing and eyeballing everything for even the smallest sign of spoor. It was about halfway down the mattress that I came across a scent the likes of which I’d never encountered. I felt something primal in my nostrils, and then a bright light flashed in my mind. The scent was so sudden, so foreign, that I couldn’t find the words, I couldn’t have alerted Q-Kee even if I’d wanted to.

  At the foot of the bed, we both stood.

  Q-Kee crossed her arms in disbelief. “They slept together, but no fucky-fucky.”

  “No what?”

  “It’s English for ‘sex,’ ” she said. “Don’t you watch movies?”

  “Not those kinds of movies,” I said, but the truth was I hadn’t seen any.

  Opening the wardrobe, Q-Kee ran a finger across Sun Moon’s choson-ots until it came to rest at an empty dowel. “This is the one she took,” Q-Kee said. “It must have been spectacular, if these are the ones she left behind. So Sun Moon wasn’t planning on being gone long, yet she wanted to look her best.” She gazed at the lustrous fabrics before her. “I know every dress she wore in every movie,” she said. “If I stood here long enough, I’d figure out the missing dress.”

  “But harvesting the garden,” I said. “That suggests they were planning on being gone a long time.”

  “Or maybe it was a last meal, in her best dress.”

  I said, “But that only makes sense if—”

  “—if Sun Moon knew what was going to happen to her,” Q-Kee added.

  “But if Sun Moon knew Ga meant to kill her, why dress up, why go along?”

  Q-Kee considered the question as her touch lingered on all those beautiful dresses.

  “Perhaps we should impound them as evidence,” I told her, “so that you could more closely inspect them at your leisure.”

  “They are beautiful,” she said. “Like my mother’s dresses. But I clothe myself. Plus, dressing like a tour guide at the International Friendship Museum, that isn’t my style.”

  Leonardo and Jujack returned from Comrade Buc’s.

  “Nothing much to report,” Leonardo said.

  “We found a hidden compartment in the kitchen wall,” Jujack added. “But inside were only these.”

  He held up five miniature Bibles.

  The light changed as the sun flashed off the steel of the distant May Day Stadium, and for a moment, we were newly stunned to be in such a residence, one without common walls or shared faucets, without cots that folded up and rolled into the corner, without a twenty-story trot down to a communal washtub.

  Behind the security of Pubyok crime-scene tape, we began divvying up all of Commander Ga’s rice and movies. Titanic, our interns agreed, was the best movie ever made. I told Jujack to throw the Bibles off the balcony. You could maybe explain a satchel full of DVDs to an MPSS officer, but not those things.

  At Division 42, I went through my daily session with Commander Ga, and except for what happened to the actress and her children, he was all too happy to give the whats and whys and wheres and whens of everything. Once again, he went over how Mongnan had implored him to put on the dead Commander’s uniform, and he reviewed the conversation with the Warden, sagging under the weight of a great rock, that allowed him to walk out of a prison camp. It’s true that when I first imagined Ga’s biography, it was the big moments that loomed large in the chapters, such as an underground showdown with the holder of the Golden Belt. But now it was a much more subtle book I was constructing, and only the hows mattered to me.

  “I understand that you talked your way out of prison,” I said to Commander Ga. “But how did you summon the nerve to go to Sun Moon’s house? What did you say to her on the heels of killing her husband?”

  Commander Ga had forsaken the bed by now. We leaned against opposite walls of the small room, smoking.

  “Where else could I go?” he asked me. “What could I say but the truth?”

  “And how did she respond?”

  “She fell down and wept.”

  “Of course she did. How did you get from there to sharing a cup?”

  “Sharing a cup?”

  “You know what I’m saying,” I told him. “How do you get a woman to love you, even though she knows you hurt people?”

  “Is there someone you love?” Commander Ga asked me.

  “I ask the questions around here,” I said, but I couldn’t let him think I had no one. I gave him a slight nod, one that suggested, Are we not both men?

  “Then she loves you despite what you do?”

  “What I do?” I asked him. “I help people. I save people from the treatment they’d get from those Pubyok animals. I’ve turned questioning into a science. You have your teeth, don’t you? Has anyone wrapped wire around your knuckles until your fingertips swelled purple and went dead? I’m asking how she loved you. You were a replacement husband. Nobody truly loves a replacement husband. It’s only their first family they care about.”

  Commander Ga began speaking on the topic of love, but suddenly his voice became static in my ears. I couldn’t hear anything, for a notion had risen in my mind, the thought that maybe my parents had had a first family, that there were children before me that they lost and that I was a late, hollow replacement. That would account for their advanced ages and for the way that, when they looked at me, they seemed to see something that was lacking. And the fear in their eyes—might it not be the unbearable fear of losing me, too, a fear of the knowledge that they couldn’t handle going through such loss again?

  I took the underground trolley to Central Records and pulled my parents’ files. All afternoon I read through them, and here I saw another reason that citizen biographies were needed: the files were filled with dates and stamps and grainy images and informant quotes and reports from housing blocks, factory committees, district panels, volunteer details, and Party boards. Yet there was no real information in them, no sense of who these two old people were, what brought them from Manpo to be line workers for life at the Testament to the Greatness of Machines Factory. In the end, though, the file’s only stamp from the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital was mine.

  Back in Division 42, I headed to the Pubyok lounge, where I moved my placard “Interrogator Number 6” from “On Duty” to “Off.” Q-Kee and Sarge were laughing together, but when I entered, they went silent. So much for sexism. Q-Kee wasn’t wearing her smock, and there was no missing her figure as she leaned back in one of the Pubyok recliners.

  Sarge held up a hand freshly wrapped with tape. Even with a head of silver hair, even in the year of his retirement, he’d broken his hand anew. He made a voice, like his hand was talking. “Did the doorjamb hurt me?” his hand asked. “Or did the doorjamb love me?”

  Q-Kee could barely suppress her laughter.

  Instead of interrogation manuals, the Pubyok bookcases were filled with bottles of Ryoksong, and I could guess how their night would go: faces would start to glow red, a few patriotic songs would get belted from the karaoke machine, and soon Q-Kee would be playing drunken table tennis with the Pubyok, all gathered ’round to watch her breasts as she leaned over, prowling her end of the table, swatting that red-hot paddle of hers.

  “You about to clear a name from the board?” Q-Kee asked me.

  Now it was Sarge who had his laugh.

  At this point, I’d missed preparing my parents’ dinner, and since the trains had stop
ped, I’d have to cross the whole city in darkness in order to help them make their bedtime trip to the bathroom. But then I had a look at the big board, my first moment in weeks to really take a look at my workload. I had eleven active cases. All of the Pubyok together had one—some guy they were softening up till morning in the sump. The Pubyok close cases in forty-five minutes just by dragging people into the shop and helping them hold the confession pen in the moments before they expire. But here, looking at all those names, I understood how far my obsession with Ga had gone. My longest open case was my military nurse from Panmunjom, accused of flirting with an ROK officer across the DMZ. It was said she gave him pinkie waves and even blew kisses hard enough to float over the minefields. It was the easiest case on the board, really, which is why I kept putting it off. Her location on the board was marked as the “Down Cell,” and I realized I’d left her there for five days. I slid my placard back to “On Duty” and got out of there before the sniggering could set in.

  The nurse didn’t smell so good when I pulled her out. The light was devastating to her.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she said, wincing. “I’m really ready to talk. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I have some things to say.”

  I took her to an interrogation bay and warmed up the autopilot. The whole thing was a shame, really. I had her biography half written—I’d probably wasted three afternoons on that. And her confession would practically write itself, but it wasn’t her fault—she’d just fallen through the cracks.

  I reclined her on one of our baby-blue chairs.

  “I’m ready to denounce,” she said. “There were many bad citizens who attempted to corrupt me, and I have a list, I’m ready to name them all.”

  I could only think of what would happen if I didn’t get my father to a bathroom in the next hour. The nurse was wearing a medical gown, and I ran my hands along her torso to ensure that she was harboring no objects or jewelry that would interfere with the autopilot.

  “Is that what you want?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “I’m ready to mend my relationship with my country,” she said. “I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to show my good citizenship.”

  She lifted her gown so that it rose above her hips and the dark frost of her pubic hair was unmistakable. I was aware of how a woman’s body was constructed and of its major functions. And yet I didn’t feel in control again until the nurse was in her restraints, and I could hear the thrum of the autopilot’s initial probings. There is always that initial involuntary gasp, that full-body tense when the autopilot administers its first licks. The nurse’s eyes focused far away, and I ran my hand along her arm and across her collarbones. I could feel the charge moving through her. It entered me, made the hairs stand on the back of my hand.

  Q-Kee was right to tease me; I’d let things slide, and here was our nurse, paying the price. At least we had the autopilot. When I first arrived at Division 42, the preferred method of reforming corrupted citizens was the lobotomy. As interns, Leonardo and I performed many. The Pubyok would grab whatever subjects were handy and in the name of training, we’d do a half-dozen in a row. All you needed was a twenty-centimeter nail. You’d lay the subject out on a table and sit on his chest. Leonardo, standing, would steady the subject’s head, and with his thumbs, hold both eyelids open. Careful not to puncture anything, you’d run the nail in along the top of the eyeball, maneuvering it until you felt the bone at the back of the socket. Then with your palm, you gave the head of the nail a good thump. After punching through the orbital, the nail moved freely through the brain. Then it was simple: insert fully, shimmy to the left, shimmy to the right, repeat with other eye. I wasn’t a doctor or anything, but I tried to make my actions smooth and accurate, not gruff like the Pubyok, whose broken hands made any delicate work apelike. I found a strong light proved most humane as the subjects were blinded to what was happening.

  We were told there were whole lobotomy collectives where former subversives now knew nothing but good-natured labor for the benefit of all. But the truth proved far different. I went with Sarge once, when I was but a month in the smock, to interrogate a guard at one of these collectives, and we discovered no model labor farm. The actions of all were blunted and stammering. The laborers would rake the same patch of ground countless times and witlessly fill in holes they’d just dug. They cared not whether they were clothed or naked and relieved themselves at will. Sarge wouldn’t stop commenting on what he thought was the indolence of the lobotomized, their group sloth. Shock-work whistles meant nothing to them, he said, and it seemed impossible to engender any notion of Juche spirit. He said, “Even children know how to step to the wheel!”

  But it was the slack faces of the braincut you never forget—the babies in the jars on display in the Glories of Science Museum have more life. That trip proved to me that the system was broken, and I knew one day I’d play a role in fixing it. Then along came the autopilot, developed by a deep-bunker think tank, and I jumped at the chance to field-test it.

  The autopilot is a hands-free piece of electronic wizardry. It’s not some brutal application of electricity like one of the Pubyok’s car batteries. The autopilot works in concert with the mind, measuring brain output, responding to alpha waves. Every consciousness has an electrical signature, and the autopilot’s algorithm learns to read that script. Think of its probing as a conversation with the mind, imagine it in a dance with identity. Yes, picture a pencil and an eraser engaged in a beautiful dance across the page. The pencil’s tip bursts with expression—squiggles, figures, words—filling the page, as the eraser measures, takes note, follows in the pencil’s footsteps, leaving only blankness in its wake. The pencil’s next seizure of scribbles is perhaps more intense and desperate, but shorter lived, and the eraser follows again. They continue in lockstep this way, the self and the state, coming closer to one another until finally the pencil and the eraser are almost one, moving in sympathy, the line disappearing even as it’s laid down, the words unwritten before the letters are formed, and finally there is only white. The electricity often gives male subjects tremendous erections, so I’m not convinced the experience is all bad. I looked at the empty blue chair next to the nurse—to catch up, I’d probably have to start doing two at a time.

  But back to my nurse. She was in a deep cycle now. The convulsions had hiked her gown again, and I hesitated before pulling it back down. Before me was her secret nest. I leaned over and inhaled deeply, breathing in—crackling bright—the ozone scent that rose from her. Then I loosened her restraints and turned out the light.

  WHEN Commander Ga arrived at the site of the artificial Texas, a morning mist hung in the air. The landscape was rolling and tree-covered, so the area’s watchtowers and surface-to-air-missile ramps couldn’t be seen. They were downstream from Pyongyang, and though you could not see the Taedong River, you could smell it in every breath, swollen and green. It had been raining recently, an early monsoon off the Yellow Sea, and with the mud and dripping willow trees, it seemed a far cry from the desert of Texas.

  He parked the Mustang and stepped out. There was no sign of the Dear Leader’s entourage. Only Comrade Buc was here, sitting alone at a picnic table with a cardboard box. Buc beckoned him over, where Ga could see that the table’s slats had been carved with initials in English. “Every last detail,” he said to Buc.

  Buc nodded at the box. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said.

  When Commander Ga looked at the box, he had a sudden feeling that inside was an object that had once belonged to the real Commander Ga. He didn’t have a sense of whether it was a jacket or a hat or why Buc would be in possession of such a thing, he only felt that what was inside had belonged to his predecessor and that when he opened the box and came in contact with the thing, when he touched it and accepted it, the real Commander Ga would hold a power over him.

  “You open it,” he said to Buc.

  Comrade Buc reached into the box and removed a pair
of black cowboy boots.

  Ga took them, turned them in his hands—they were the same pair he’d held in Texas.

  “How’d you find these?” he asked.

  Buc didn’t answer, but gave a grin of pride that he could find any item on earth, anywhere, and fetch it to Pyongyang.

  Ga removed his dress shoes, which, he now realized, actually had belonged to his predecessor. They’d been at least a size too large. When he sank his feet into the cowboy boots, they fit perfectly. Buc took one of Commander Ga’s dress shoes and studied it.

  “He was always such an ass about his shoes,” Buc said. “He made me procure them for him in Japan. They had to be from Japan.”

  “What should we do with them?”

  “They’re fine shoes,” Buc said. “They’d be worth a small fortune at a night market.”

  But then Buc tossed them into the mud.

  Together, the two men began walking the site, making sure everything was in order for the Dear Leader’s inspection. The Japanese chuck wagon looked convincing enough, and there was no end of fishing poles and scythes. Near the shooting stand was a bamboo cage that contained the dark motion of poisonous snakes.

  “Does it feel like Texas to you?” Comrade Buc asked.

  Commander Ga shrugged. “The Dear Leader’s never been to Texas,” he said. “He’ll think it looks like Texas, that’s all that matters.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” Buc said.

  Ga looked up to see if it would rain. This morning the rainfall had been heavy, obscuring everything out the windows, so the light was faint when Sun Moon shifted to his side of the bed. “I have to know if he’s really gone,” she said. “So many times my husband disappeared, only to reappear days or weeks later, in ways that would surprise you, test you. If he came back now, if he saw what we were planning … you don’t even know.” Here she paused. “When he really hurts people,” she added, “he doesn’t take snapshots.”