Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Through the window, the sun was starting to glow in the rigging of the fishing fleet. And the young woman outside stepped aside every time a two-wheeled, fish-hauling cart came by.

Jun Do said, “How about you tell me what you’re doing here?”

“I told you,” he said. “I wanted to show you my wife—she’s very beautiful, don’t you think?”

Jun Do just looked at him.

The Second Mate went on, “Of course she is. She’s like a magnet, you know, you can’t resist her beauty. My tattoo doesn’t do her justice. And we practically have a family already. I’m a hero now, of course, and it’s pretty much a lock that I’ll make Captain someday. I’m just saying, I’m a guy who’s got a lot to lose.” The Second Mate paused, choosing his words. “But you, you got no one. You’re on a cot in the kitchen of a monster’s house.” The woman outside made a gesture of beckoning, but the Second Mate waved her off. “If you’d just punched that American in the face,” he said, “you’d be in Seoul by now, you’d be free. That’s what I don’t get. If a guy has no strings, what’s stopping him?”

How to tell the Second Mate that the only way to shake your ghosts was to find them, and that the only place Jun Do could do that was right here. How to explain the recurring dream that he’s listening to his radio, that he’s getting the remnants of important messages, from his mother, from other boys in his orphanage. The messages are hard to dial in, and he’s awoken before with his hand on the bunk post, as if it were his UHF fine tuner. Sometimes the messages are from people who are relaying messages from other people who have spoken to people who have seen his mother. His mother wants to get urgent messages to him. She wants to tell him where she is, she wants to tell him why, she keeps repeating her name, over and over, though he can’t quite make it out. How to explain that in Seoul, he knows, the messages would stop.

“Come,” Jun Do said. “We should get you to the Captain for some stitches.”

“Are you kidding? I’m a hero. I get to go to the hospital now.”

When the Junma left port again, they had new portraits of the Great and Dear Leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. They had a new galley table, and they also had a new commode, for it was not right for a hero to shit in a bucket, though heroes of North Korea have endured far worse and done so without complaint. They also had a new DPRK flag, which they lowered eleven kilometers from shore.

The Captain was in high spirits. On deck was a new locker, and with a foot upon it, he called the crew together. From the locker, he first produced a hand grenade. “This,” he said, “I have been given in the event the Americans return. I am to drop it in the aft hold and scuttle our dear ship the Junma. ”

Jun Do’s eyes went wide. “Why not drop it in the engine room?”

The Machinist gave him a screw you look.

The Captain then threw the grenade into the sea, where it made not so much as a zip as it went under the surface. To Jun Do, he said, “Don’t worry, I would have knocked first.” The Captain kicked open the locker to reveal an inflatable life raft, clearly taken out of an old Soviet passenger jet. It had once been orange, but was now faded to a dull peach, and next to its red handle was an ominous warning against smoking during deployment. “After the grenade goes off, and our beloved vessel slips below the waves, I have been ordered to deploy this , lest we lose the life of our resident hero. I don’t have to tell you the trust that has been placed in us to receive such a gift.”

The Second Mate stepped forward, almost as if he was afraid of the thing, to inspect the Cyrillic writing. “It’s bigger than the other one,” he said.

“A whole planeload of people could fit in that raft,” the Machinist told him. “Or the greatness of one hero.”

“Yeah,” the First Mate said. “I for one would be honored to tread water next to a raft that contained a true Hero of the Eternal Revolution.”

But the Captain wasn’t done. “And I figure it is time to make the Third Mate an official member of our crew.” He withdrew from his pocket a folded piece of waxed paper. Within this were nine fine sewing needles, cauterized together. The tips of the needles were blackened from many tattooings. “I’m no Russian,” he told Jun Do, “but you’ll see I became pretty handy at this. And here we don’t even have to worry about the ink freezing.”

In the galley, they reclined Jun Do upon the table and had him take off his shirt. When the Pilot saw Jun Do’s naked chest, he said, “Ah, a virgin,” and everyone laughed.

“Look,” Jun Do said, “I’m not so sure about this. I’m not even married.”

“Relax,” the Captain said. “I’m going to give you the most beautiful wife in the world.”

While the Pilot and the First Mate flipped through the calendar of the actress Sun Moon, the Captain sprinkled his powdered ink into a spoon and mixed it with drops of water until it was just wetter than paste. The calendar had hung for a long time in the pilothouse, but Jun Do had never really given it much attention because it reeked of the patriotism that came over the loudspeakers. He’d only ever glimpsed a couple of movies in his life, and those were Chinese war movies his unit was shown during bad weather days in the military. Certainly there’d been posters around for Sun Moon’s movies, but they must not have seemed to apply to him. Now, watching the First Mate and Pilot flip through the movie posters, discussing which one had the best image and expression for a tattoo, he was jealous of the way they recalled famous scenes and lines of North Korea’s national actress. He noted a depth and sadness in Sun Moon’s eyes, the faint lines around them bespeaking a resoluteness in the face of loss, and it took everything in him to suppress the memory of Rumina. And then the idea of a portrait, of any person, placed over your heart, forever, seemed irresistible. How was it that we didn’t walk around with every person who mattered tattooed on us forever? And then Jun Do remembered that he had no one that mattered to him, which was why his tattoo would be of an actress he’d never seen, taken from a calendar at the helm of a fishing boat.

“If she’s such a famous actress,” Jun Do said, “then everyone in North Korea will recognize her and know she’s not my wife.”

“The tattoo,” the Captain said, “is for the Americans and South Koreans. To them, it will simply be a female face.”

“Honestly,” Jun Do said. “I don’t even know why you guys do this, what’s the point of tattooing your wife’s face on your chest?”

The Second Mate said, “Because you’re a fisherman, that’s why.”

“So they can identify your body,” the Pilot said.

The quiet Machinist said, “So that whenever you think of her, there she is.”

“Oh, that sounds noble,” the First Mate said. “But it’s to give the wives peace of mind. They think no other woman will sleep with a man who has such a tattoo, but there are ways of course, there are girls.”

“There is only one reason,” the Captain said. “It’s because it places her in your heart forever.”

Jun Do thought about that. A childish question came to him, one that marked him as someone who had never known any kind of love. “Are you placing Sun Moon in my heart forever?” he asked.

“Oh, our young Third Mate,” the Captain said, smiling to the others. “She’s an actress. When you see her movies, that’s not really her. Those are just characters she plays.”

Jun Do said, “I haven’t seen her movies.”

“There you go, then,” the Captain said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”