Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

In the pilothouse, some sailors were screwing around with the radio. You could hear them in there transmitting messages. One picked up the handset and said, “This is a person-to-person message to Kim Jong Il from Tom John-son. We have intercepted your primping boat, but can’t locate your hairspray, jumpsuit, or elevator shoes, over.”

The Captain had been expecting a lifeboat, so when down the rope came a yellow bundle no bigger than a twenty-kilogram rice sack, he was confused. Jervis showed him the red deployment handle and mimed with large arms how it would expand.

All the Americans had little cameras, and when one started taking pictures, the rest of them did, too, of the piles of Nikes, of the brown sink where the crew shaved, of the turtle shell drying in the sun, of the notch the Machinist cut in the rail so he could crap into the sea. One sailor got ahold of the Captain’s calendar of the actress Sun Moon, depicting movie stills from her latest films. They were laughing about how North Korean pinup girls wore full-length dresses, but the Captain was having none of it: he went over and snatched it back. Then one of the sailors came out of the pilothouse with the ship’s framed portrait of Kim Jong Il. He’d managed to pry it off the wall, and he was holding it up.

“Get a load of this,” he said. “It’s the man himself.”

The crew of the Junma stood graven.

Pak was instantly in motion. “No, no, no,” he said. “This is very serious. You must put that back.”

The sailor wasn’t giving up the portrait. “You said they were spies, right? Finders fucking keepers, right, Lieutenant?”

Lieutenant Jervis tried to defuse things. “Let the boys have a couple tokens,” he said.

“But this is nothing to joke about,” Pak said. “People go to prison over this. In North Korea, this could mean death.”

Another sailor came out of the pilothouse, and he’d gotten loose the portrait of Kim Il Sung. “I got his brother,” he announced.

Pak held out his hands. “Wait,” he said. “You don’t understand. You could be sending these men to their graves. They need to be detained and questioned, not condemned.”

“Look what I got,” another sailor said. He came out of the pilothouse wearing the Captain’s hat, and in two short steps, the Second Mate had drawn his sharking knife and put it to the sailor’s throat.

A half-dozen rifles were unslung, and they made a nearly instantaneous click . Above, on the deck of the frigate, all the sailors with their cups of coffee froze. In the quiet was the familiar clank of the rigging, and water sloshing out of the live well. Jun Do could feel how the waves rebuffed from the frigate’s bow double-rocked the Junma .

Very calmly, the Captain called to the Second Mate. “It’s just a hat, son.”

The Second Mate answered the Captain, though he didn’t unlock eyes with the sailor. “You can’t go around the world doing whatever you want. There are rules and the rules have to be followed. You can’t just up and steal people’s hats.”

Jun Do said to him, “Let’s just let the sailor go.”

“I know where the line is,” the Second Mate said. “I’m not crossing it—they are. Someone has to stop them, someone has to take those ideas out of their heads.”

Jervis had his sidearm out. “Pak,” he said. “Please translate that this man is about to get shot.”

Jun Do stepped forward. The Second Mate’s eyes were cold and flashing with uncertainty, and the sailor looked to him for help. Jun Do carefully took the hat off the sailor’s head, then put a hand on the Second Mate’s shoulder. The Second Mate said, “A guy has to be stopped before he does something stupid,” then took a step back and tossed his knife into the sea.

Rifles high, the sailors cast an eye toward Jervis. He approached Jun Do. “Obliged for helping your man stand down,” he said, and with a handshake, slipped Jun Do his officer’s card. “If you’re ever in the free world,” he said, then gave the Junma a last, long look. “There’s nothing here,” he added. “Let’s have a controlled withdrawal, gentlemen.”

And then in what was almost a ballet—rifle down, retreat, shift, replace, rifle up—the eight Americans left the Junma so that seven rifles were pointed at the crew at all times, and yet, in a brief series of silent moments, the deck was clear and the boarding craft was away.

Right away, the Pilot was at the helm to bring the Junma about, and already the fog was stealing the edges of the frigate’s gray hull. Jun Do half closed his eyes, trying to peer inside it, imagining its communications deck and the equipment there, how it could perceive anything, how it had power to apprehend everything that was uttered in the world. He looked at the card in his hand. It wasn’t a frigate at all, but an interceptor, the USS Fortitude , and his boots, he realized, were crawling with shrimp.

Even though their fuel was low, the Captain ordered a heading of due west, and the crew hoped he was making for the safety of North Korean waters, rather than a shallow cove in which to scuttle the disgraced Junma . They were running with the waves at a good clip, and with land in sight it was strange not to have a flag clapping above. The Pilot at the helm kept looking at the two white squares on the wall where their leaders’ portraits had been.

Jun Do, exhausted in the middle of the day, swept the shrimp he’d spilled into the gutter troughs and out into the water, returning them to whatever world had made them. But it was fake work, this sweeping, as it was fake work that the mates were about with the live well, just as the wrench the Machinist held was a prop. The Captain was circumnavigating the deck, growing angrier, judging by the way he muttered to himself, and while no one wanted to be near him when he was like this, no one wanted to take an eye off him, either.

The Captain passed Jun Do again. The old man’s skin was red, the black of his tattoos practically shouting. “Three months,” he said. “Three months on this boat, and you can’t even pretend to be a fisherman? You’ve watched us empty a seine purse on this deck a hundred times—don’t you eat off the same plates as us and shit in the same bucket?”

They watched the Captain walk to the bow, and when he came back, the mates stopped pretending to work, and the Pilot stepped out of the helm.

“You camp down there with your headphones on, tuning your dials and clacking all night on your typewriter. When you came aboard, they said you knew taekwondo, they said you could kill. I thought that when the time came you would be strong. But what kind of intelligence officer are you—you can’t even pretend to be an ignorant peasant like the rest of us.”

“I’m not in intelligence,” Jun Do said. “I’m just a guy they sent to language school.”

But the Captain wasn’t listening. “What the Second Mate did was stupid, but he took action, he was defending us, not putting us in jeopardy. But you, you froze, and now it may be over for us.”

The First Mate tried to say something, but the Captain glared at him. “You could have said you were a reporter, doing a story on humble fishermen. You could have said you were from Kim Il Sung University, that you were studying shrimp. That officer wasn’t trying to be your friend. He doesn’t care about you at all.” The Captain pointed toward the shore. “And they’re even worse,” he said. “People don’t mean anything to them, anything at all.”

Jun Do stared, without affect, into the Captain’s eyes.

“Do you understand?”

Jun Do nodded.

“Then say it.”

“People don’t mean anything to them,” Jun Do said.