Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

He wiped the residue of her tears.

“Compose a song of departure for our Night Rower. Please sing her away from us. Wear that red choson-ot for me, won’t you? Tell me you’ll wear it. Just try it on, try it on and tomorrow we’ll send that American girl back to whatever forsaken place it was that bred her.”

Sun Moon cast her eyes downward. Slowly, she nodded.

The Dear Leader, too, slowly nodded. “Yes,” he said softly.

Then he lifted a finger, and who should briskly arrive astride a forklift but Comrade Buc, sweat dripping from his brow. Do not gaze upon him, citizens! Avert your eyes from the puppetry of his traitorous smile.

“To guard the modesty of Sun Moon,” the Dear Leader said, “she’ll need some type of changing station at the airport.”

Comrade Buc took a deep breath. “Nothing but the finest,” he said.

The Dear Leader took her by the arm and turned her toward the lights and music.

“Come,” he said. “I have a last movie to show you. The American visit has got me thinking about cowboys and frontier justice. So I have composed a Western. You’ll play the long-suffering wife of a Texas cattle driver who’s being exploited by capitalist landowners. When a corrupt sheriff accuses the cattle driver of rustling—”

She stopped him.

“Promise me nothing bad will happen to him,” Sun Moon said.

“Who? The cattle driver?”

“No, my husband. Or whoever he is,” she said. “He has a good heart.”

“In this world,” the Dear Leader told her, “no one can make such a promise.”

COMMANDER GA smoked on the balcony, eyes narrowed to the dark road below, searching for any sign of the car that might return Sun Moon to him. He heard the faraway bark of a dog in the zoo, and he recalled a dog on a beach long ago, standing sentinel at the waves for someone who would never return. There were people who came into your life and cost you everything. Comrade Buc’s wife was right about that. It had felt pretty shitty being one of those people. He had been the person who took. He’d been the one who was taken. And he’d been the one left behind. Next he would find out what it was like to be all three at once.

He extinguished his cigarette. There were stray celery seeds on the rail from the boy’s bird snare. Ga rolled them under his finger as he gazed upon a city whose surface was black, but below was a labyrinth of brightly lit bunkers, one of which, he was certain, held Sun Moon. Who had thought up this place? Who had concocted its existence? How ugly and laughable was the idea of a quilt to Comrade Buc’s wife. Where was the pattern, with what fabric, would someone sew the story of life in this place? If he had learned anything about the real Commander Ga by living in his clothes and sleeping in his bed, it was the fact that this place had made him. In North Korea, you weren’t born, you were made, and the man that had done the making, he was working late tonight. The stray seeds on the balcony rail led the way to a mound of seeds. Ever so slowly, Ga extended his hand to them. Where was it, he wondered, that Comrade Buc’s wife got her calm in the face of it all? How was it she knew what had to be done? Suddenly, a twig twitched, a stone fell, a thread tightened, and then a little noose cinched itself around Ga’s finger.

He searched the house, looking for information—for what purpose, of what kind, he didn’t know. He went through Commander Ga’s rice-wine collection, laying hands on each bottle. He stood on a chair, and with the use of a candle, studied a variety of pistols, haphazard in the upper cabinet. In the tunnel, he ran his eyes across all the DVDs, looking for one that might address his situation, but it didn’t seem Americans made such movies. He studied the pictures on their covers and read their descriptions, but where was the film that had no beginning, an unrelenting middle, and ended over and over? Reading English made his eyes hurt and then it started him thinking in English, which forced him to think of tomorrow, and, for the first time in a long time, he was filled with great fear. There would be English in his head until he heard the voice of Sun Moon.

When at last her car arrived, he was lying flat in the bed, letting the breathing of the children—unconscious, elemental—soothe him. He listened to her enter in the dark and in the kitchen ladle herself a glass of water. When she opened the door to the bedroom, he felt for the box of matches and drew one.

“Don’t,” she said.

He feared that she had somehow been damaged or marked, that she was trying to hide something that had been inflicted upon her.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

He listened to her change into her bedclothes. Despite the darkness, he could visualize her, the way she removed garments and draped them across a chair back, how she balanced herself, hand against the wall, to step into the shift she would wear to sleep. He could sense her in the dark, touching the children’s faces, making sure they were safe and dreaming deep.

When she was under the covers, he lit the candle, and there she was, illuminated in golden light.

“Where did he take you?” he asked. “What did he do to you?”

He studied her face, looking for a sign of what she might have gone through.

“He didn’t hurt me,” she said. “He simply gave me a glimpse of the future.”

Ga saw the three choson-ots hanging red, white, and blue against the wall.

“Is that part of it?” he asked.

“Those are the costumes I’m to wear tomorrow. Won’t I look like one of those patriotic tour guides in the War Museum?”

“You’re not to wear your own dress, the silver one?”

She shook her head.

“So you’ll leave here looking like the showgirl he wants you to be,” he said. “I know that’s not how you wanted to go, but the important thing is that you get out. You’re not having second thoughts, are you? You’re still going, right?”

“We’re still going, right?” she said. Then something caught her eye. She looked up to the empty mantel. “Where are the peaches?”

He paused. “I threw the can off the balcony,” he told her. “We won’t need them anymore.”

She stared at him.

“What if someone finds them and eats them?” she asked.

“I cut open the lid first,” he said, “so they’d all spill out.”

Sun Moon cocked her head. “Are you lying to me?”

“Of course not.”

“Can I still trust you?”

“I threw them away because we’re not taking that path,” he said. “We’re choosing a different one, one that leads to a life like the one in the American movie.”

She rolled to her back and stared at the ceiling.

“What about you?” he asked. “Why won’t you tell me what he did to you?”

She pulled the sheet higher and kept ahold of the fabric.

“Did he put his hands on you?”

“There are things that happen in this world,” she said. “And what is there to say about them?”

Ga waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t.

After a while, she exhaled.

“The time has come for me to be intimate with you,” she said. “There are many things that the Dear Leader knows about me. When we’re safe on a plane, I’ll tell you my story, if that’s what you want. Tonight I’m going to tell you the things he doesn’t know.”

She craned her neck toward the candle and blew it out.

“The Dear Leader doesn’t have a clue about how my husband and Commander Park plotted against him. The Dear Leader doesn’t know that I hate his constant karaoke, that I’ve never sung a song for pleasure in my life. He has no idea that his wife used to send me notes—she put his seal on them to get me to open them, but I never did. He could never know how I turn my hearing off when he starts to confide his vile secrets to me. I would never tell him how much I hated you for making me eat a flower, how I loathed you for forcing me to break my vow never to eat as a starving person again.”