The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  Her hand was on his chest. He reached for her shoulder, the skin warm from the covers. “Trust me,” he told her. “You’ll never see him again.” He ran his hand down her side, feeling the soft skin travel under his fingers.

  “No,” she said and pulled back. “Just tell me he’s dead. Ever since we decided on our plan, now that we’re risking everything, I can’t shake this feeling that he’s coming back.”

  “He’s dead, I promise,” he told her. But it wasn’t so simple. It wasn’t so simple because it had been dark and chaotic in the mine. He’d sunk a rear scissors choke on Commander Ga and held it for the full count and then some. When Mongnan came and found him, she told him to put on Ga’s uniform. He got dressed and listened when she told him what to say to the Warden. But when she told him to crush the naked man’s skull with a rock he shook his head no. Instead, he rolled the body into a shaft. It turned out to be a shallow one. They heard the body tumble briefly before sliding to a rest, and with the seed of doubt Sun Moon had placed in his chest, he, too, now had the feeling that he’d only almost killed the real Commander Ga, that the man was out there somewhere, recovering, regaining his strength, that when he was himself again, he’d be coming.

  Ga walked to the corral. “This is the only Texas we’ve got,” he said to Buc, then climbed the poles to sit on the top rung. A lone water ox was penned inside. A few fat, widely spaced raindrops fell, but they weren’t followed by others.

  Comrade Buc was busy lighting a fire in the pit, but mostly he was making smoke. From where he sat atop the corral, Ga could see eels gulping air along the surface of the fishing pond and hear the flap of a Texas state flag, hand-painted on Korean silk. The ranch looked enough like Texas to make him think of Dr. Song. But when he thought of what had happened to Dr. Song, the place suddenly looked nothing like America. It was hard to believe the old man was gone. Ga still saw him sitting there in the dark moonlight of a Texas night, holding his hat against the wind. He could still hear Dr. Song’s voice in the aircraft hangar, A most fascinating journey, never to be repeated.

  Comrade Buc splashed more fuel oil on the fire, raising a dark column.

  “Wait till the Dear Leader brings the Americans out here,” Buc said. “When the Dear Leader’s happy, everyone’s happy.”

  “About that,” Ga said. “Don’t you think your work’s about done here?”

  “What?” Buc asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Looks like you got your hands on all the stuff you had to get. Shouldn’t you move on to the next project and forget about all of this?”

  “You upset about something?” Comrade Buc asked him.

  “What if it turns out the Dear Leader isn’t happy? What if something goes wrong and he ends up very unhappy? Have you thought of that?”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Buc said. “To not let that happen.”

  “And then there’s Dr. Song, who did everything right, and look what they did to him.”

  Buc turned away, and Ga could tell that the man did not want to talk about his old friend.

  Ga said, “You’ve got a family, Buc. You should get some distance from this.”

  “But you still need me,” Buc said. “I still need you.” Buc walked to the fire pit and retrieved the Dear Leader’s branding iron, which had just begun to heat. Buc used both arms to heft the thing—he held it up for Ga’s inspection. In English, the letters running backward, the brand read: “PROPERTY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF KOREA.”

  The letters were big, making the brand almost a meter long. Red hot, it would sear an animal’s entire side.

  “It took the guys at the foundry a week to make this,” Buc said.

  “So?”

  Buc looked impatient. “So? I don’t speak English. I need you to tell me if we spelled it right.”

  Commander Ga carefully read the letters in reverse. “It’s right,” he said. Then he slipped through the corral rungs and went to the ox, tethered by a ring in its nose. He fed the beast watercress from a bin, then rubbed the black plate between its horns.

  Comrade Buc neared, and by the way he warily eyed the large animal, it was pretty clear he’d never been commandeered to help with the harvest.

  “You know how I told you about defeating Commander Ga in a prison mine?”

  Buc nodded.

  “He was lying there naked, and he looked pretty dead. A friend told me to drop a large rock on his skull.”

  “Wise friend,” Buc said.

  “But I couldn’t do it. Now, I keep thinking, you know—”

  “—that Commander Ga is still alive? Impossible. If he were alive, we’d know it, he’d be on top of us right now.”

  “I know he’s dead. The only point is this,” Ga said. “I keep having this feeling that something bad is ahead. You’ve got a family. You should think about them.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” Buc asked.

  “I’m just trying to help you,” Ga told him.

  “You’re planning something, I can tell,” Buc said. “What are you up to?”

  “I’m not,” Ga said. “Let’s just forget I said anything.”

  Buc stopped him. “You’ve got to tell me,” he said. “Look, when the crow came, I opened my house, we extended our exit plan to you. I’ve said nothing to anyone about your real identity. I gave you my peaches. If something’s up, you have to tell me.”

  Ga didn’t say anything.

  “Like you said, I have a family. What about them?” Buc asked. “How am I supposed to protect them if you leave me in the dark?”

  Commander Ga looked around the ranch, at the pistols, the pitchers for lemonade, the gift baskets on the picnic tables. “When the American plane leaves, we’ll be on it, Sun Moon, the kids, me.”

  Comrade Buc cringed. “No, no, no,” he said. “You don’t tell anyone, ever. Don’t you know that? You never tell. Not your friends, not your family, especially not me. You could get everyone killed. If they interrogate me, they’ll know I knew. And that’s assuming you make it. Do you know the cushy promotion I’d get for turning you in?” Buc threw his hands up. “You don’t ever tell. Nobody tells. Never.”

  Commander Ga stroked the ox’s black neck, then patted it twice, dust rising from its greasy coat. “That branding iron will probably kill it, you know. That wouldn’t impress the Americans.”

  Comrade Buc began lining fishing poles up against a tree. His hands were shaky. When he had them all set, a line snagged, and the poles fell over again. He looked at Ga, as if it were his fault. “But you,” he said. “You’re the one who tells.” He shook his head. “That’s why you’re different. Somehow the rules are different for you, and that’s why you maybe have a shot at making it.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Is the plan simple?”

  “I think so.”

  “Don’t tell me anything more. I don’t want to know.” There was thunder, and Buc looked up, gauging whether rain was imminent. “Just answer this—are you in love with her?”

  “Love,” that was a very big word.

  “If something happened to her,” Buc asked, “would you want to go on without her?”

  Such a simple question—how had he not asked himself this? He felt her steady hand on his tattoo from the other night, the way she let him quietly weep in bed beside her. She didn’t even turn down the lantern so she wouldn’t have to look upon his vulnerability. She’d just watched him, concern in her eyes, until sleep drew near.

  Ga shook his head no.

  Headlights appeared in the distance. Buc and Ga turned to see a black car navigating the muddy ruts on the road. It wasn’t the Dear Leader’s caravan. As it neared, they could see its wipers were still on, so it had come from the direction of the storm.

  Buc turned to him, so they were close. He spoke with urgency. “I’ll tell you what I know about how this world works. If you and Sun Moon go together with the kids, maybe there’s a chance you’ll
make it, maybe.” The first drops of rain fell. The ox lowered its head. “But if Sun Moon and the kids somehow get on that plane, yet you’re by the Dear Leader’s side, directing his focus, making excuses, diverting his attention, they’ll probably make it.” And here Comrade Buc let go of his permanent grin and laughing squint. When his face went slack, it was clear its natural state was seriousness. “It also means,” he said, “that you’ll absolutely be around to pay the price for this, rather than dutiful citizens like myself and my children.”

  A lone figure was walking toward them. He was military, they could tell. As the rain thickened, he made no effort to shield himself, and they watched his uniform darken as he neared. Ga opened his spectacles and peered through them. For some reason, he could make out nothing of the man’s face, but the uniform was unmistakable: he was a commander.

  Comrade Buc regarded the figure nearing them. “Fuck me,” he said, and turned to Ga. “You know what Dr. Song said about you? He said you had a gift, that you could say a lie while speaking the truth.”

  “Why’d you tell me that?”

  “Because Dr. Song never got the chance to tell you,” Buc said. “And here’s something I have to say to you. There’s probably no way you could pull this off without me. But if you stick around after this happens, if you stay and bear the burden, I’ll help you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Commander Ga did the worst thing that’s ever been done to me. Then he went right on living next door. And I had to go on working on the same floor with him. I had to bend over and check his shoe size before I ordered his slippers from Japan. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him coming at me. When I lay with my wife, I felt Ga’s weight atop me. But you, you came along and fixed him for me. When you arrived, he vanished.”

  Comrade Buc stopped and turned. Ga turned, too.

  Then from the rain appeared the scarred face of Commander Park.

  “Forget about me?” Park asked.

  “Not at all,” Ga said. He watched beads of rain trace the wounds in Park’s face and wondered if this wasn’t the inspiration for the disfigured man in the Dear Leader’s script.

  “There’s been a turn of events,” Commander Park said. “Comrade Buc and I are going to take inventory of the situation here.” He fixed his eyes on Ga. “And you, the Dear Leader will brief you himself. And after this is all said and done, perhaps you and I will have a chance to rekindle our friendship.”

  “Ah, you’ve just come from Texas,” the Dear Leader said when he saw Commander Ga’s muddy boots. “What do you think? Is the ranch convincing?”

  The Dear Leader was in a white hallway, deep underground, deciding which of two identical doors he should open. When the Dear Leader reached for one, the knob buzzed, and Ga could hear an electric lock unbolt.

  “It was uncanny,” Ga said. “Like stepping into the Old West.”

  Ga’s ears were still pulsing from the elevator’s plunge. His uniform was wet, and the underground cold penetrated him. How far below Pyongyang he was, he had no way of knowing. The bright fluorescent lights looked familiar, as did the white cement walls, but he could only wonder if they were on the same level as last time.

  “Sadly,” the Dear Leader said, “I might not get a chance to behold it.”

  Inside, the room was filled with gifts, awards, platters, and plaques, all with blank areas where inscriptions and occasions were to be engraved across the silver or bronze. The Dear Leader placed his hand on a rhinoceros horn, one in a set of bookends. “Mugabe keeps giving us these,” he said. “The Americans would piss Prozac if we surprised them with a pair of these. But that raises the question: what gift do you give a guest who travels a great distance to visit but won’t accept your hospitality?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Ga said.

  The Dear Leader felt the tip of the rhino’s horn. “The Americans have informed us that this will not be a diplomatic mission after all. It is an exchange, they now say, which will take place at the airport. They ask that we bring our pretty rower there, and it will be on the runway, provided we supply a forklift, that they return what they stole from me.”

  Ga was suddenly offended. “They won’t taste our corn biscuits or fire our pistols?”

  The Dear Leader’s laugh lines went slack, and he regarded Ga with eyes so serious that a stranger would take them for sad. “In doing this, they steal from me something much larger.”

  “What about the Texas ranch?” he asked the Dear Leader. “We’ve built it complete.”

  “Dismantle it, move it to the airport,” he said. “Put it in a hangar where we can access it if we decide we can still use some of it.”

  “Everything? The snakes, the river eels?”

  “You have eels? Now I’m really sorry I missed it.”

  Ga tried to visualize taking a hearth apart or a branding pit. That monstrous branding iron now seemed like a labor of love, and he couldn’t imagine it packed away in the cinema house’s property lot, as likely to see the light of day again as a hand-painted, silken flag of Texas.

  “Do the Americans offer a reason?”

  The Dear Leader’s eyes panned the room, trying, Ga could tell, to find a gift that might match his humiliation. “The Americans say there is a window two days from now in which no Japanese spy satellites will be flying over. The Americans fear the Japanese would be furious to learn that—Oh, fuck them!” the Dear Leader said. “Do they not know that on my soil they play by my rules! Do they not know that when their wheels touch the ground they are beholden to me, to my tremendous sense of duty!”

  “I know the gift,” Commander Ga said.

  The Dear Leader eyed him with suspicion.

  “When our delegation left Texas, there were a couple of surprises at the airport.”

  The Dear Leader said nothing.

  “There were two pallets, the kind a forklift would use. The first was loaded with food.”

  “A pallet of food? This was not in the report I read. No one confessed to that.”

  “The food was not from the Senator, but from his church. There were barrels of flour and hundred-kilo sacks of rice, burlap bags of beans, all stacked up in a cube and wrapped tight with plastic.”

  “Food?” the Dear Leader asked.

  Ga nodded.

  “Go on,” the Dear Leader said.

  “And on another skid were little Bibles, thousands of them, shrink-wrapped in plastic.”

  “Bibles,” the Dear Leader said.

  “Very small ones, with green vinyl covers.”

  “How have I not heard any of this?”

  “Of course we didn’t accept it, we left it on the runway.”

  “On the runway,” the Dear Leader said.

  “There was one other thing,” Commander Ga said. “A dog, a baby one. It was given to us by the Senator’s wife herself, bred from her own stock.”

  “Food aid,” the Dear Leader said, his eyes darting about, thinking. “Bibles and a dog.”

  “The food is already prepared,” Ga said.

  “And of the Bibles?”

  Ga smiled. “I know an author whose thoughts on opera should be required reading in all civilized nations. A thousand copies could easily be obtained.”

  The Dear Leader nodded. “About the dog, what Korean pet would be the equivalent? A tiger, perhaps? A tremendous snake?”

  “Why not give them a dog back—we’ll say it’s the Senator’s dog, and say we’re returning it because it’s selfish, lazy, and materialistic.”

  “This dog,” the Dear Leader said, “must be the most vicious, snarling cur in all the land. It must have tasted the blood of baboons in the Central Zoo and chewed on the bones of half-starved prisoners in Camp 22.” The Dear Leader looked off, as if he wasn’t at the bottom of a bunker, but on a plane, watching the Senator being ravaged by a rabid canine for the sixteen hours it took to return to Texas.

  “I know just the dog,” Commander Ga said.

  “You know,” the
Dear Leader said, “you broke my driver’s nose.”

  Ga said, “The nose will heal back stronger.”

  “Spoken like a true North Korean,” the Dear Leader said. “Come, Commander, there’s something I’ve been meaning to show you.”

  They moved to another floor, to another room that looked just like the last one. Ga understood that sameness was meant to confuse an invading force, but wasn’t the effect worse on those who must daily endure it? In the halls, he could feel the presence of security teams, always just out of sight, making the Dear Leader seem eternally alone.

  In the room was a school desk with a lone computer monitor, its green cursor blinking. “Here’s the machine I promised to show you,” the Dear Leader said. “Were you secretly mad at me for making you wait?”

  “Is this the master computer?” Ga asked.

  “It is,” the Dear Leader answered. “We used to have a dummy version, but that was only for interrogations. This one contains the vital information for every single citizen—it tells you date of birth or date of death, current location, family members, and so on. When you type in a citizen’s name, all this information is sent to a special agency that dispatches a crow right away.”

  The Dear Leader ushered Commander Ga into the chair. Before him was only the black of the screen, that green flash. “Everyone’s in here?” Ga asked.

  “Every man, woman, and child,” the Dear Leader said. “When a name is typed on this screen, it is sent to our finest team. They act with great dispatch. The person in question will be found and transported right away. There is no evading its reach.”

  The Dear Leader pushed a button, and on the screen appeared a number: 22,604,301.

  He pressed the button again, and the number changed: 22,604,302.

  “Witness the miracle of life,” the Dear Leader said. “Do you know we are fifty-four-percent female? We didn’t discover that until this machine. They say that famine favors the girls. In the South, it’s the opposite. They have a machine that can tell if a baby will be a boy or a girl, and the girls they dispose of. Can you imagine that, killing a girl baby, still in the mother?”