Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

At first she plucked its strings high, creating notes that were fast and bright. She strummed the sounds of the rocket blast, her voice laced with humor and rhyme. As the dog left gravity for space, her playing became ethereal, the strings reverberating, as if sounding together in a void. Candlelight was alive in the fall of Sun Moon’s hair, and when she pursed her lips to play more difficult chords, Ga felt it in his chest, in the out-chambers of his heart.

He was stricken anew by her, overcome with the knowledge that in the morning he would have to relinquish her. In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be. Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you’d once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on. Before you relinquished yourself—Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs—you let go of all the others, each person you’d once known. They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary. Sun Moon appeared to him now like this, not as a woman, vital and beautiful, making an instrument speak her sorrow, but as the flicker of someone once known, a photo of a person long gone.

The story of the dog became more lonesome now and melancholy. He tried to control his breathing. There was nothing beyond the light of the candle, he told himself. The glow included the boy, the girl, this woman, and himself. Beyond that, there was no Mount Taesong, no Pyongyang, no Dear Leader. He tried to diffuse the pain in his chest across his body, the way his pain mentor Kimsan had once taught him, to feel the flame not on the part but the entire, to visualize the flow of his blood spreading, diluting the hurt in his heart across the whole of him.

And then he closed his eyes and imagined Sun Moon, the one that was always within him—she was a calm presence, open-armed, ready to save him at all times. She wasn’t leaving him, she wasn’t going anywhere. And here the sharp pain in his chest subsided, and Commander Ga understood that the Sun Moon inside him was the pain reserve that would allow him to survive the loss of the Sun Moon before him. He began to enjoy the song again, even as it grew increasingly sad. The sweet glow of the puppy’s moon had given way to an unfamiliar rocket on an uncertain course. What had started as the children’s song had become her song, and when the chords became disconnected, the notes wayward and alone, he understood that it was his. Finally, she stopped playing and leaned slowly forward until her forehead came to rest against the fine wood of an instrument she would never play again.

“Come, children,” Ga said. “It’s time for bed.”

He ushered them to the bedroom and closed the door.

Then he tended to Sun Moon, helping her to the balcony for some fresh air.

The lights of the city below were glowing beyond their usual hour.

She leaned against the rail, turning her back to him. It was quiet, and they could hear the children through the wall as they made rocket noises and gave the dog its launch instructions.

“You okay?” he asked her.

“I just need a cigarette, that’s all,” she said.

“Because you don’t have to go through with it, you can back out and nobody will ever know.”

“Just light it for me,” she said.

He cupped his hand and lit the cigarette, inhaling.

“You’re having second thoughts,” he said. “That’s natural. Soldiers have them before every mission. Your husband probably had them all the time.”

She glanced at him. “My husband never had a second thought about anything.”

When he extended the cigarette to her, she looked at the way he held it in his fingers and turned again to face the city lights. “You smoke like a yangban now,” she said. “I like the way you used to smoke, when you were still a boy from nowhere.”

He reached to her, pulling her hair aside so he could see her face.

“I’ll always be a boy from nowhere,” he told her.

She shook her hair back in place, then reached for her cigarette, the V of her fingers indicating where it should be placed.

He took her by the arm, turned her to him.

“You can’t touch me,” she said. “You know the rules.”

She tried to pull loose, but he didn’t let her.

“Rules?” he asked. “Come tomorrow, we’ll have broken every rule there is.”

“Well, tomorrow’s not here yet.”

“It’s on its way,” he told her. “Sixteen hours, that’s how long the flight is from Texas. Tomorrow’s in the air right now, circling the world to us.”

She took the cigarette. “I know what you’re after,” she said. “I know what you want with your talk of tomorrow . But there’ll be plenty of time, a forever’s worth. Don’t lose focus on what we have to do. So much has to go right before that plane takes off with us.”

He held his grip on her arm. “What if something goes wrong? Have you thought of that? What if today is all there is?”

“Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.”

He let go of her, and she turned to the rail, smoking now. Neighborhood by neighborhood, the lights of Pyongyang extinguished themselves. As the landscape blacked out, it became easier to see the headlights of a vehicle that was climbing the switchbacks of the mountain toward them.

“You want me?” she eventually said. “You don’t even know me.”

He lit his own cigarette. The lights of the May Day Stadium had stayed on, along with the Central Cinema Studio north of town, on the road to the airport. Other than that, the world had gone dark.

“Your hand reaches for mine when you sleep,” he said. “I know that.”

Sun Moon’s cigarette burned red as she inhaled.

“I know that you sleep curled up tight,” he added, “that whether you’re a yangban or not, you didn’t grow up with a bed. You probably slept as a child on a small cot, and though you’ve never spoken of siblings, you probably reached out to touch the brother or sister asleep in the next one.”

Sun Moon stared ahead, as if she hadn’t heard him. In the silence, he could just make out the sound of the car below, but couldn’t guess at what kind. He checked to see if Comrade Buc had heard the car and was on his balcony, but the house next door was dark.

Commander Ga went on, “I know you pretended to be asleep one morning to give me more time to study you, to allow me to see the knot in your collarbone where someone had hurt you. You let me see the scars on your knees, scars that tell me you once knew real work. You wanted me to know the real you.”

“I got those from dancing,” she said.

“I’ve seen all your movies,” he said.

“I’m not my movies,” she snapped at him.

“I’ve seen all your movies,” he went on, “and in all of them, you hair is the same—straight, covering your ears. And yet by pretending to be asleep …” Here he reached into her hair again, fingers finding her earlobe. “… you let me see where your ear had been notched. Did an MPSS agent catch you stealing from a market stall, or were you picked up for begging?”

“Enough,” she said.

“You’d tasted a flower before, hadn’t you?”

“I said stop it.”

He reached to the small of her back, pulling her till their bodies touched. He threw her cigarette over the balcony, then he held his to her lips so she would understand that they would now share and that each inhale would come from him.