The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  The peaches were half gone. I stirred them in their can, selecting a new slice.

  “Save some for yourself,” my father said.

  “Yes, that’s enough,” my mother said. “I haven’t tasted sweet in so long, my stomach cannot handle it.”

  I shook my head no. “This is a rare can of peaches,” I said. “I was going to keep them for myself, but taking the easy way, that’s not the answer to life’s problems.”

  My mother’s lip started to quiver. She covered it with her hand.

  “But back to my problem,” I said. “My biography, and the difficulty I’ve had writing it. This biographer’s block I’ve been suffering from—I see it so clearly now—came from the fact that deep down, I knew no one wanted to hear my story. Then my friend, he had the insight that his tattoo wasn’t public, but personal. Though it was there for the world to see, it was truly for no one but himself. Losing that, he lost everything, really.”

  “How can a person lose a tattoo?” my father asked.

  “Unfortunately, it’s easier than you’d think,” I told them. “It got me thinking, though, and I realized I wasn’t composing for posterity or the Dear Leader or for the good of the citizenry. No, the people who needed to hear my story were the people I loved, the people right in front of me who’d started to think of me as a stranger, who were scared of me because they no longer knew the real me.”

  “But your friend, he killed the people he loved, right?”

  “It’s unfortunate, I know,” I said. “There’s no forgiving him for it, he hasn’t even asked. But let me get started with my biography. I was born in Pyongyang,” I began, “to parents who were factory workers. My mother and father were older, but they were good parents. They survived every worker purge and avoided denunciation and reeducation.”

  “But we already know these things,” my father said.

  “Shh,” I told him. “You can’t talk back to a book. You don’t get to rewrite a biography as you’re reading it. Now, back to my story.” As they finished the peaches, I relayed to them how normal my childhood was, how I played the accordion and recorder at school, and while in the choir, I sang high alto in performances of Our Quotas Lift Us Higher. I memorized all the speeches of Kim Il Sung and got the highest marks in Juche Theory. Then I began with the things they didn’t know. “One day a man from the Party came to our school,” I said. “He loyalty-tested all the boys, one at a time, in the maintenance shed. The test itself only lasted a couple of minutes, but it was quite difficult. I suppose that’s the point of a test. I’m happy to say I passed the test, all of us did, but none of us ever spoke of it.”

  It felt very liberating to finally speak of this, a topic I could never commit to paper. I knew suddenly that I would share everything with them, that we’d be closer than ever—I’d tell them of the humiliations I suffered in mandatory military service, of my one sexual encounter with a woman, of the cruel hazing I’d received as an intern of the Pubyok.

  “I don’t mean to dwell on the subject of this loyalty test, but it changed how I saw things. Behind a chest of medals might be a hero or a man with an eager index finger. I became a suspicious boy who knew there was always something more beneath the surface, if you were willing to probe. It perhaps sent me down my career path, a trajectory that has confirmed that there is no such thing as the right-minded, self-sacrificing citizen the government tells us we all are. I’m not complaining, mind you, merely explaining. I didn’t have it half as rough as some. I didn’t grow up in an orphanage like my friend Commander Ga.”

  “Commander Ga?” my father asked. “Is that your new friend?”

  I nodded.

  “Answer me,” my father said. “Is Commander Ga your new friend?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But you can’t trust Commander Ga,” my mother said. “He’s a coward and a criminal.”

  “Yes,” my father added. “He’s an imposter.”

  “You don’t know Commander Ga,” I told them. “Have you been reading my files?”

  “We don’t need to read any files,” my father said. “We have it on the highest authority. Commander Ga’s an enemy of the state.”

  “Not to mention his weaselly friend Comrade Buc,” my mother added.

  “Don’t even say that name,” my father cautioned.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked. “Tell me about this authority.”

  They both pointed toward the loudspeaker.

  “Every day they tell some of his story,” my mother said. “Of him and Sun Moon.”

  “Yes,” my father said. “Yesterday was episode five. In it, Commander Ga drives to the Opera House with Sun Moon, but it’s not really Commander Ga, you see—”

  “Stop it,” I said. “That’s impossible. I’ve made very little progress on his biography. It doesn’t even have an ending.”

  “Listen for yourself,” my mother said. “The loudspeaker doesn’t lie. The next installment is this afternoon.”

  I dragged a chair to the kitchen, where I used it to reach the loudspeaker. Even after I tore it from the wall, it was connected to a cable that kept it squawking. Only with a meat knife was I able to shut it up.

  “What’s happening?” my mother asked. “What are you doing?”

  My father was hysterical.

  “What if the Americans sneak-attack?” he asked. “How will we receive the warning?”

  “You won’t have to worry about sneak attacks anymore,” I told them.

  My father moved to protest, but a stream of saliva ran from his mouth. He reached for his mouth and felt his lips, as if they had gone numb. And one of my mother’s hands was showing a tremor. She stilled it with her other hand. The botulism toxin was beginning to bloom inside them. The time for suspicions and arguments was over.

  I remembered that horrible picture of Comrade Buc’s family, crumpled beneath the table. I was resolved that my parents wouldn’t suffer such indignities. I gave them each a tall glass of water and placed them on their cots to await the fall of night. All afternoon and into the twilight, I gave them the gift of my story, every bit of it, and I left nothing out. I stared out the window as I spoke, and I concluded only when they’d begun to writhe on their cots. I couldn’t act until darkness arrived, and when it finally did, the city of Pyongyang was like that black cricket in the fairy tale—it was everywhere and nowhere, its chirp annoying only those who ignored the final call to slumber. The moon shimmered off the river, and after the eagle owls had struck, you could hear nothing of the sheep and goats but the clicking of their teeth as they chewed grass in the dark. When darkness was total, and my parents had lost their faculties, I kissed them good-bye, for I could not bear to witness the inevitable. A sure sign of botulism is a loss of vision, so I only hoped they’d never know what had struck them. I looked around the room a last time, at our family photograph, my father’s harmonica, their wedding rings. But I left it all. I could take nothing where I was going.

  There was no way Commander Ga could attempt the arduous journey ahead with an open wound. At the night market, I bartered my Pubyok badge for some iodine and a large compress. Crossing the city in the dark, headed for Division 42, I felt the stillness of the big machine at rest. There was no thrum of electricity in the wires overhead or gurgle of water in the pipes. Pyongyang was coiling in the dark to pounce upon the next day. And how I loved the capital springing to life, morning wood smoke in the air, the smell of frying radishes, the hot burn of trolley brakes. I was a city boy. I would miss the metropolis, its hubbub and vitality. If only there were a place here for a person who gathered human stories and wrote them down. But Pyongyang is already filled with obituary writers. And I can’t stand propaganda. You’d think a person would get used to cruel fates.

  When I appeared in Commander Ga’s room, he asked, “Is it morning already?”

  “Not yet,” I told him. “There’s still time.”

  I tried to minister to Commander Ga as best I could. The iodine t
urned my fingers red, making it look as if I were the one who’d brutalized the man before me. But when I placed the bandage on Commander Ga, the wound disappeared. I used the whole roll of tape to secure it.

  “I’m getting out of here,” I told him. “Would you like me to bring you along?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you care where you’re going, or about the obstacles ahead?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “Are you ready? Do you need to do anything to prepare?”

  “No,” he told me. “I’m ready.”

  I helped him up, then sailor-carried him across Division 42 to an interrogation bay, where I rolled him into a baby-blue chair.

  “This is where you gave me an aspirin when I first came,” he said. “It seems like so long ago.”

  “It won’t be a bad journey,” I told him. “On the other side, there won’t be Pubyok or cattle prods or branding irons. Hopefully, you’ll get sent to a rural farm collective. Not an easy life, but you can start a new family and serve your nation in the true spirit of communism—through labor and devotion.”

  “I had my life,” Commander Ga said. “I’ll pass on the rest.”

  I grabbed two sedatives. When Commander Ga declined one, I took them both.

  From the supply cabinet, I flipped through the diapers until I found a medium.

  “Would you like one?” I asked. “We keep some on hand for when VIPs come through. It can save some embarrassment. I have a large right here.”

  “No thanks,” he said.

  I dropped my trousers and secured mine, using the adhesive tabs.

  “You know, I respect you,” I said. “You were the only guy who came through that never talked. You were smart—if you’d told us where the actress was, they’d have killed you right away.”

  “Are you going to hook me up to this machine?”

  I nodded.

  He looked at the autopilot’s wires and energy meters. “There’s no mystery,” he said. “The actress simply defected.”

  “You never stop, do you? You’re about to lose everything you own but your heartbeat, and still you’re trying to throw us off the trail.”

  “It’s true,” he said. “She got on an airplane and flew away.”

  “Impossible,” I told him. “Sure, a few peasants risk life and limb to cross an icy river. But our national actress, under the nose of the Dear Leader? You insult me.”

  I handed him a pair of paper booties. He sat on his baby-blue chair, and I sat on mine, and together we removed our shoes and socks to put them on.

  “Not to insult you,” he said, “but whose pictures do you think are on my phone? My wife and children vanish, but then, from far away, photos of a woman and her children appear. Is that such a mystery?”

  “It’s a conundrum, I’ll admit. I pondered it much. But I know that you killed the people you loved. There’s no other way.” I pulled his phone from my pocket and used its buttons to erase the pictures. “If an interrogator starts questioning the only thing he knows for sure, then … but please, I am not that person anymore. I no longer take biographies. Only my own story concerns me now.” I dropped the phone into a stainless-steel basin, along with a few coins and my ID badge, which said only “Interrogator.”

  He indicated the leather restraints. “You’re not going to put these on me, are you?”

  “I have to, I’m sorry. I’ll need people to know that I did this to you, and not the other way around.”

  I reclined his chair, then strapped down his legs and arms. I did him the favor of leaving the buckles pretty loose.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t manage to finish your biography,” I told him. “If I hadn’t failed, I could have sent your biography with you, so when you reached the other side, you could read who you were and become you again.”

  “Don’t worry,” he told me. “She’ll be on the other side. She’ll recognize me and tell me who I am.”

  “I can offer you this,” I said, holding up a pen. “If you like, you can write your name someplace on your body, a place they won’t notice—on your umkyoung, or between your toes. That way, later, you might discover who you were. I’m not trying to trick you to learn your identity, I assure you.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “I don’t want to know who I was,” I said.

  “I don’t even know what name I’d write,” he told me.

  I knelt to connect all the electrodes to his cranium. “You know they’re telling your story over the loudspeakers,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but since you’re not going to be repenting in the soccer stadium tomorrow, I figure they’ll have to come up with a new ending for your story.”

  “An ending to my story,” he said. “My story’s ended ten times already, and yet it never stops. The end keeps coming for me, and yet it takes everyone else. Orphans, friends, commanding officers, I outlast them all.”

  He was clearly confusing himself and his story, which is the natural result of certain tribulations. “This isn’t the end of you,” I told him. “It’s a new beginning. And you haven’t outlasted all your friends. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  He stared at the ceiling as though a parade of people he’d once known were passing there.

  “I know why I’m in this blue chair,” he said. “What about you?”

  Aligning all the red-and-white wires leading from his skull was like braiding hair.

  “This used to be a place,” I told him, “where meaningful work was done. Here, a citizen was separated from his story. That was my job. Of the two, it was the story that was kept, while the person was disposed of. I was okay with that. In this way, many deviants and counterrevolutionaries were discovered. True, sometimes the innocent fell with the guilty, but there was no other way to discover the truth, and unfortunately, once a person has his story taken, by the roots if you will, it can’t be given back. But now …”

  Ga craned his neck to look at me. “Yes?”

  “Now the person is lost along with his life. Both die.”

  I adjusted the output dial of his autopilot. Ga had a strong mind, so I set it at eight.

  “Tell me again how intimacy works?” I asked.

  “It turned out to be easy,” Ga said. “You tell someone everything, the good, the bad, what makes you look strong and what’s shameful as well. If you killed your wife’s husband, you must tell her. If someone tried to man-attack you, you must tell that, too. I told you everything, as best as I was able. I may not know who I am. But the actress is free. I’m not sure I understand freedom, but I’ve felt it and she now has it too.”

  I nodded. It was satisfying to hear again. It restored my inner calm. With my parents, I had finally been intimate. And Commander Ga was my friend, despite the lie about the actress being alive. He’d so fully digested it that it had somehow become true to him. By his twisted logic, he was telling me, his friend, the absolute truth.

  “See you on the other side,” I said.

  He fixed his eyes at some point that didn’t exist.

  “My mother was a singer,” he said.

  When he closed his eyes, I flipped the switch.

  He made the usual involuntary motions, eye flashing, arm levitation, gulping for air like a carp at the surface of a meditation pond. My mother was a singer were his last words, as if they were the only ones he could trust to describe who he’d been.

  I climbed into the next blue chair, but didn’t bother with the restraints. I wanted the Pubyok to know that I’d chosen my own path, that I’d rejected their ways. I hooked up my own wiring harness and turned my attention to the autopilot’s output dial. I never wanted to remember a thing about this place, so I set it at eight and a half. But then again, I didn’t want a lobotomy, either. I adjusted it to seven and a half. And if I was being intimate with myself, I could also admit I was afraid of the pain. I settled for six and a half.

  Trembling with hope and, stran
gely, regret, my finger flipped the switch.

  My arms rose before me. They looked like someone else’s arms. I heard moaning and realized it was me. A tongue of electricity licked deep inside my brain, probing, as molars are inspected after a meal. I’d imagined the experience would be one of numbness, but my thinking was hyper, thoughts flying. Everything was singular—the gleam of a metal armature, the violent green of a fly’s eye. There was only the thing itself, without connection or context, as if everything in your mind had become unlinked to everything else. Blue and leather and chair, I couldn’t put them together. The scent of ozone was without precedent, the incandescence of a lightbulb lacked all antecedent. The fine hairs in my nose stiffened. My erection stood abominable and alone. I saw no icy peak or white flower. I scanned the room for them, but saw only elements: shine, slick, coarse, shade.

  I became aware of Commander Ga moving beside me. Arms aloft, it was all I could do to roll my head slightly to observe him. He had an arm free from its restraint, and he was reaching for the dial. I saw him turn it to maximum, a lethal dose. But I could worry about him no longer. I was on my own voyage. Soon I would be in a rural village, green and peaceful, where people swung their scythes in silence. There would be a widow there, and we would waste no time on courtship. I would approach her and tell her I was her new husband. We would enter the bed from opposite sides at first. For a while, she would have rules. But eventually, our genitals would intercourse in a way that was correct and satisfying. At night, after I had made my emission, we would lie there, listening to the sounds of our children running in the dark, catching summer frogs. My wife would have the use of both her eyes, so she would know when I blew out the candle. In this village, I would have a name, and people would call me by it. When the candle went out, she would speak to me, telling me to sleep very, very deeply, and as the electricity stropped itself sharper in my mind, I listened for her voice, calling a name that would soon be mine.

  IN THE MORNING, Commander Ga woke to the roaring engines of an American military cargo jet. The children were already awake, staring at the ceiling. They knew this wasn’t the once-a-week flight to Beijing or the twice-monthly grasshopper to Vladivostok. The children had never even heard an airplane over Pyongyang, which was restricted airspace. Not once since the American firebombing raids of 1951 had a plane been spotted over the nation’s capital.