Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Later in the night, after the power was out and the moon had set, Jun Do went on his roof in the absolute darkness and felt his way to the stove flue. He hoped to rig an antenna that would extend from the flue with the pull of a rope. Tonight, he was just running the cable, and even that had to be done under cover of total dark. He could hear the ocean out there, feel the offshoreness of it in the air on his face. And yet, when he sat on the pitch, he could make out none of it. He’d seen the sea in the daylight, been upon it countless times, but what if he hadn’t? What might a person think was out there in the unfathomably grand darkness that lay ahead? The finless sharks, at least, had seen what was below the ocean, and their consolation was that they knew toward what they were descending.

At dawn, the shock-work whistles sounded, usually Jun Do’s signal to go to bed. The loudspeaker came on and began blaring the morning announcements.

“Greetings, citizens!” it began.

There was a knock at the door, and when Jun Do answered, he found the Second Mate. The young man was quite drunk, and he’d been in a vicious fight.

“Did you hear the news?” the Second Mate asked. “They made me a Hero of the Eternal Revolution—that comes with all the medals and a hero’s pension when I retire.”

The Second Mate’s ear was torn, and they needed to get the Captain to give his mouth some stitches. The swelling on the boy’s face was general, with a few bright, isolated knots. Pinned on his chest was a medal, the Crimson Star. “Got any snake liquor?” he asked.

“How about we step down to beer?” Jun Do responded before popping the caps off two bottles of Ryoksong.

“I like that about you—always ready to drink in the morning. What’s that toast? The longer the night , the shorter the morning. ”

When the Second Mate drank from his bottle, Jun Do could see there were no marks on his knuckles. He said, “Looks like you made some new friends last night.”

“Let me tell you,” the Second Mate said. “Acts of heroism are easy—becoming a hero is a bitch.”

“Let’s drink to acts of heroism, then.”

“And their spoils,” the Second Mate added. “Speaking of which, you have got to check out my wife—wait till you get a load of how beautiful she is.”

“I look forward to it,” Jun Do told him.

“No, no, no,” the Second Mate said. He went to the window and pointed to a woman standing alone in the fish-cart lane. “Look at her,” he said. “Isn’t she something? Tell me she’s not something.”

Jun Do peered through the window. The girl had wet, wide-set eyes. Jun Do knew the look on her face: as if she desperately wanted to be adopted, but not by the parents who were visiting that day.

“Tell me she’s not outrageous,” the Second Mate said. “Show me the more beautiful woman.”

“There’s no denying it,” Jun Do said. “You know she’s welcome to come in.”

“Sorry,” the Second Mate said, and plopped back in his chair. “She won’t set foot in this place. She’s afraid of ghosts. Next year, I’ll probably put a baby in her—then her breasts will swell with milk. I can tell her to come closer if you want a better look. Maybe I’ll have her sing. You’ll fall out the window when you hear that.”

Jun Do took a pull from his beer. “Have her sing the one about true heroes refusing all rewards.”

“You’ve got a screwed-up sense of humor,” the Second Mate said, holding the cold beer bottle against his ribs. “You know the children of heroes get to go to red-tier schools? Maybe I’ll have a whole brood and live in a house like this. Maybe I’ll live in this very one.”

“You’re welcome to it,” Jun Do told him. “But it doesn’t look like your wife would join you.”

“Oh, she’s a child,” he said. “She’ll do anything I say. Seriously, I’ll call her in here. You’ll see, I can make her do anything.”

“And what about you, you’re not afraid of ghosts?” Jun Do asked.

The Second Mate looked around, newly appraising the house. “I wouldn’t want to put too much thought into how things ended for the Canning Master’s kids,” he said. “Where did it happen?”

“Upstairs.”

“In the bathroom?”

“There’s a nursery.”

The Second Mate leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling. And then he closed his eyes. For a moment, Jun Do thought he was asleep. Then the Second Mate spoke up. “Kids,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about, right? That’s what they say.”

“That’s what they say,” Jun Do said. “But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.”

The Second Mate had been a babe in the ’90s, so to him, these years after the famine must have been ones of glorious plenitude. He took a long drink of beer. “If everyone who had it shitty and bit the dust became a fart,” he said, “the world would stink to the treetops, you know what I mean?”

“I suppose.”

“So I don’t believe in ghosts, okay? Someone’s canary dies, and they hear a tweet in the dark, and they think, Oh , it’s the ghost of my bird . But if you ask me, a ghost is just the opposite. It’s something you can feel, that you know is there, but you can’t get a fix on. Like the captain of the Kwan Li . The doctors ended up having to amputate. I don’t know if you heard that or not.”

“I didn’t,” Jun Do told him.

“When he woke in the hospital, he asked, Where’s my arm , and the doctors said, Sorry , but we had to amputate , and the captain says, I know my arm is gone , where is it , but they won’t tell him. He can feel it, he says, making a fist without him. In the tub, he can feel the hot water with his missing arm. But where is it—in the trash or burned? He knows it’s out there, he can literally feel it, but he’s got no powers.”

“To me,” Jun Do said, “what everybody gets wrong about ghosts is the notion that they’re dead. In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.”

“Like the Captain’s wife?”

“Like the Captain’s wife.”

“I never even met her,” the Second Mate said. “But I see her face on the Captain, and it’s hard not to wonder where she is and who she’s with and does she still think about the Captain.”

Jun Do lifted his beer and drank in honor of this insight.

“Or maybe your Americans at the bottom of the ocean,” the Second Mate said. “You hear them down there tinkering around, you know they’re important, but they’re just beyond your reach. It only makes sense, you know, it’s right in line with your profile.”

“My profile? What’s my profile?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” the Second Mate said. “Just something the Captain talked about once.”

“Yeah?”

“He only said that you were an orphan, that they were always after things they couldn’t have.”

“Really? You sure he didn’t say it was because orphans try to steal other people’s lives?”

“Don’t get upset. The Captain just said I shouldn’t be too friendly with you.”

“Or that when they die, orphans like to take other people with them? Or that there’s always a reason someone becomes an orphan? There are all kinds of things people say about orphans, you know.”

The Second Mate put his hand up. “Look,” he said. “The Captain just told me that nobody had ever taught you loyalty.”

“Like you know anything about it. And if you have any interest in facts, I’m not even an orphan.”

“He said you’d say that. He wasn’t trying to be mean,” the Second Mate said. “He just said that the military weeds out all the orphans and puts them through special training that makes them not have feelings when bad things happen to other people.”