Adam Johnson - Fortune Smiles - Stories

Sun-ho gave back the flyer. “What do you think people are going to do with these? It’s cold in the North. Unless you’re including matches, those leaflets will be worthless.”

“You’re wrong,” Seo said. “We must get the word out.”

“They know they’re suffering, they don’t need you to tell them the regime is bad.”

“Do they know?” Seo asked. “In secret, I suspected. But I had no way of knowing . Perhaps if I had come across a flyer, sent from the South by people who cared — well, my suspicions would’ve been confirmed. Maybe I would’ve acted sooner.”

“This is a jacket,” Sun-ho said. “Jackets are good things to send in the winter. It’s lightweight, down-filled. Look, it says North Face right here. North Face is the best. In this pocket are some energy bars.” Sun-ho opened a pocket to display two Samsung phones inside. “There’s also a map.” Sun-ho reached into another pocket and removed some Fortune Smiles.

“Are those lottery tickets?” Seo asked.

Sun-ho looked down, frustrated. “The map’s in the other pocket,” he said.

Seo asked, “No offense, but your plan is to send oppressed people a designer jacket and a long shot at good fortune? What they need is the truth.”

“I don’t believe in fortune,” Sun-ho said. “These tickets are all winners.”

“How could you know that?”

Gritting his teeth, Sun-ho stood silent.

“Kim Jong-un is a human rights violator,” Seo said. “The UN made it official. The most important thing we can send is news. First you free the mind. Then the body will follow.”

“Thanks for the philosophy,” Sun-ho said. “How about we do a thought experiment? Let’s release our balloons at the same time and then imagine the people in the fields who see them floating in. One balloon carries pamphlets. The other delivers a warm down jacket stuffed with cell phones, food and winning lottery tickets. Let’s imagine which one the citizens run toward.”

“There’s no way you’re launching your balloons with mine.”

“Why’s that? Are you scared of the truth?”

“What is today’s date?” Seo asked.

“February thirteenth,” Sun-ho said.

“And you were born in North Korea?”

Sun-ho got a suspicious look on his face. “Yeah.”

“And who was born on February sixteenth?”

Sun-ho grimaced. “Kim Jong-il,” he said.

“And what is the message printed on your balloons?”

Sun-ho couldn’t bring himself to say it.

“I’m trying to send dispatches of truth and solidarity,” Seo said. “You’ll appear to be sending gifts and well-wishes in honor of the Dear Leader.”

“So it might seem to some,” Sun-ho said, and released the jacket, which sailed quickly north. Then he neared Seo, so the two were in each other’s breath. “There is a bit of truth and solidarity you can share with me,” Sun-ho added. “Tell me where you get those big balloons.”

—

Two nights later, the cell phone Sun-ho had given DJ rang. DJ sat up in his bunk. There was only the sound of men snoring and a faint city-glow through the security windows. He had the eerie feeling he’d awakened in the North. For a moment, he felt that beyond the metal bunks and concrete room stood the steel skeletons of abandoned factories, and past that the icy calm of the moonlit East Sea. On nights he’d wake like this in Chongjin, he’d drink scorched rice water and stare out the window at the fields of cars they had to work on, cars once owned by people whose lives he tried and tried to imagine.

The phone thrummed in his hand. DJ pulled the scratchy wool blanket around him. He touched the screen. “Yes,” he whispered.

“This is Assistant Inspector Kang, at Samseong Station. We have a gentleman in custody who won’t give his name. This number was the only contact in his phone.”

“What did he do?”

“It says here he was picked up for entering traffic,” Kang said. “Looks like he was yelling at drivers for obeying the stoplights. Probably alcohol-related.”

“I know him,” DJ said. “I’ll be right there.”

The station was on the Green line, so DJ arrived quickly. The officers were orderly and efficient. One took him past a large holding tank to a row of individual rooms. There he found Sun-ho lying alone on a metal bench. His eyes were open; DJ sat on the floor and looked into them. He saw a weary calm that suggested Sun-ho had been through a battle with the police, that the blank look had come after a long-avoided surrender.

“Is it true, my friend, have you been drinking?”

Sun-ho shook his head.

“Come, they’ll let me take you home.”

“I’m going to spend the night,” Sun-ho said. “I don’t mind it here. It’s warm, and a man can stretch out.”

“What, on this metal bench, locked in a holding room?”

“I need something from you,” Sun-ho said. “Will you do me a favor?”

“What kind of favor?”

“Why would you ask that? Do you forget everything I’ve done for you? Don’t you remember Najin? How about Comrade Seok? Have you forgotten the May Day shipment?”

“I saved your ass many times, too,” DJ said. “Your temper got you into a lot of trouble.”

“Just come to Gangnam tomorrow night, okay? If you come to one of my meetings, you’ll understand. This will all make sense. I’m in the tallest building on Dosan-daero, near Seolleung-ro. I’ll meet you out on the street outside, just after sunset.”

There was something wrong about it all, DJ thought, but he nodded. “You have to do something for me,” he said. “Give this place a chance. It takes getting used to, I know. But today I saw a bus stop for an old woman. The bus had hydraulics or something — it knelt low so the woman could climb on. That would never happen at home. The North would never make a machine that bowed down to a person.”

But Sun-ho didn’t listen. “And bring your new girlfriend,” he said. “A touch of the accordion never hurts — trust me, the Gangnam ladies will love that.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” DJ said. “She has a husband.”

Sun-ho grunted. “She had a husband. Everything in the North is gone. That goes for us as well. Your parents, whom you can’t bring yourself to talk about — they’re gone. Everything I had, everything I was, none of it exists here.” Sun-ho rolled so he faced the wall. “Now go,” he said.

“I can’t just leave you in jail.”

“No? Why not?”

“It feels like I’m abandoning you.”

Sun-ho glanced back, smiling for the first time. “You say that word like it’s a bad thing.”

—

The next night, DJ did as he’d agreed. When darkness fell, he and Mina made their way to Apgujeong in Gangnam. Here Shinsegae glowed in gold and purple light while Luxury Hall crawled with scrolling color. There were stores clad in metallic armor and stores whose colored tiles climbed down the walls and spilled into the street. In one shopwindow they saw a pink teddy bear with diamonds for eyes; in another, cupcakes coated with flakes of gold. You didn’t have to be North Korean to know that entire families rose or fell for less than what some were willing to pay for a jewel-crusted hip-hop baseball cap.

Mina donned the accordion and, revealing a streak of dark irony, played “Following the Party to the End” as they strolled by the window displays.

On Dosan, near Seolleung-ro, Sun-ho called out to them.

“Come, my friends, come,” he shouted.

When they approached, Mina played a riff from “Nowhere Without You.”

“So, where’s this good-time meeting?” she asked.

DJ stared at Sun-ho’s North Face jacket. “Didn’t you send that north?”

Sun-ho smiled. “That was a spare,” he said.