Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“What kind of name is Sun Moon?” Jun Do asked.

“I guess she’s a celebrity,” the Captain said. “Maybe all the yangbans in Pyongyang have strange names.”

They selected an image from Tyrants Asunder . It was a head shot, and instead of staring duty-bound toward a distant imperialist army or looking up to Mount Paektu for guidance, Sun Moon here regarded the viewer with a reverence for all they would have lost together by the time the final movie credits rolled.

The Pilot held the calendar steady, and the Captain began with her eyes. He had a good technique—he’d draw the needles backward, teasing them in and out of the skin with the kind of shimmy you use to cinch a bosun’s knot. That way the pain was less, and the needle tips went in at an angle, anchoring the ink. The Captain used a wet rag to wash away stray ink and blood.

As he worked, the Captain wondered aloud to himself. “What should the Third Mate know of his new wife?” he mused. “Her beauty is obvious. She is from Pyongyang, a place none of us will ever see. She was discovered by the Dear Leader himself and cast in A True Daughter of the Country , the first North Korean movie. How old was she then?”

“Sixteen,” the First Mate said.

“That sounds about right,” the Pilot said. “How old are you?” he asked the Second Mate.

“Twenty.”

“Twenty,” the Pilot said. “That movie was made the year you were born.”

The roll of the ship seemed not to bother the Captain at all. “She was the darling of the Dear Leader, and she was the only actress. No one else could star in a movie, and this went on for years. Also, despite her beauty, or because of it, the Dear Leader would not allow her to marry, so that all of her roles were only roles, as she did not know herself of love.”

“But then came Commander Ga,” said the Machinist.

“Then came Commander Ga,” the Captain repeated in the absent way of someone lost in fine details. “Yes, he is the reason you don’t have to worry about Sun Moon being placed too deeply in your heart.”

Jun Do had heard of Commander Ga—he was practically preached in the military as a man who’d led six assassination missions into South Korea, won the Golden Belt in taekwondo, and purged the Army of all the homosexuals.

The Second Mate said, “Commander Ga even fought a bear.”

“I’m not so sure about that part,” the Captain said, outlining the subtle contours of Sun Moon’s neck. “When Commander Ga went to Japan and beat Kimura, everyone knew that upon his return to Pyongyang, he would name his prize. The Dear Leader made him Minister of Prison Mines, which is a coveted position, as there is no work to be done. But Commander Ga demanded possession of the actress Sun Moon. Time passed, there was trouble in the capital. Finally, the Dear Leader bitterly relented. The couple married, had two children, and now Sun Moon is remote and melancholy and alone.”

Everyone went quiet when the Captain said this, and Jun Do suddenly felt for her.

The Second Mate threw him a pained look. “Is that true?” he asked. “Do you know that’s how she ended up?”

“That’s how all wives end up,” the Captain said.

Late that night, Jun Do’s chest hurt, and he yearned to hear from the girl who rowed in the dark. The Captain had told him that seawater would keep the tattoo from getting septic, but Jun Do wouldn’t take the chance of going up top for a bucket and missing her. More and more, he felt as if he was the only one in the world who understood her. It was Jun Do’s curse to be nocturnal in a nation without power at night, but it was his duty, too, like picking up a pair of oars at sunset or letting the loudspeakers fill your head as you sleep. Even the crew thought of her as rowing toward dawn, as if dawn was a metaphor for something transcendent or utopian. Jun Do understood that she was rowing until dawn, when with weariness and fulfillment she could pack it in for sleep. It was deep into the night when he finally found her signal, faint from traveling so far from the north.

“The guidance system is broken,” she said. “It keeps saying the wrong things. We’re not where it says we are, we can’t be. Something’s out on the water, but we can’t see it.”

The line went quiet, and Jun Do reached to fine-tune the signal.

Then she was back. “Does this work?” she asked. “Is it working? There’s a ship out there, a ship without lights. We shot it with a flare. The red streak bounced off the hull. Is anyone out there, can anyone rescue us?”

Who was attacking her? he wondered. What pirate would attack a woman who wished nothing more than to make her way through the dark? Jun Do heard a pop over the line—was it the pop of gunfire?—and parading through his head came all the reasons it was impossible to rescue her: that she was too far north, that the Americans would find her, that they didn’t even have maps of those waters. All true, but of course the real reason was him. Jun Do was why they couldn’t chart a course to rescue her. He reached forward and turned off the receiver, the green afterimage of its dials lingering in his eyes. He felt the sudden static of cool air when he removed his headphones. Up on deck, he scanned the horizon, looking for the lone red arc of her emergency flare.

“Lose something?” the Captain asked. He was just a voice from the helm.

Jun Do turned to see the tip of his glowing cigarette.

“Yeah,” Jun Do said. “I think I did.”

The Captain didn’t leave the pilothouse. “That boy’s pretty messed up right now,” he said. “The last thing he needs is some craziness from you.”

Using a lanyard, Jun Do fished a bucket of water from the sea and poured it on his chest. He felt the pain as a memory, something from long ago. He looked upon the sea some more. The black waves would rise and clap, and in the troughs between them, you could imagine anything was out there. Someone will save you , he thought. If you just hold tight long enough , someone’s bound to .

The crew put down longlines all day, and when Jun Do woke at sunset, they were bringing aboard the first sharks. Now that they’d been boarded by Americans, the Captain was no longer afraid of being boarded by Americans. He asked that Jun Do channel the broadcasts through a speaker on the deck. It would be late, Jun Do warned them, before the naked rower checked in, if that’s what they were hoping for.

The night was clear, with regular rollers from the northeast, and the deck lights penetrated far into the water, showing the red eyeshine of creatures just a little too deep to make out. Jun Do used the array antenna, and rolled the crew through the whole spectrum, from the ultralow booms of sub-to-sub communications to the barking of transponders guiding jet autopilots through the night. He let them listen to the interference caused when the radar of distant vessels swept through them. At the top of the dial was the shrill rattle of a braille book broadcaster, and out there at the very peak was the trancelike hiss of solar radiation in the Van Allen belts. The Captain was more interested in the drunk Russians singing while they operated an offshore drilling platform. He muttered every fourth or fifth line, and if they gave him a minute, he said, he’d name the song.

The first three sharks they brought aboard had been eaten by a larger shark, and nothing remained below the gills. Jun Do found a woman in Jakarta who read English sonnets into a shortwave, and he approximated them as the Captain and mates examined the bite radius and peered through the sharks’ empty heads. He played for them two men in unknown countries who were attempting to solve a mathematical problem over a ham radio, but it proved very difficult to translate. For a while, Jun Do would stare toward the northerly horizon, then he would force himself not to stare. They listened to planes and ships and the strange echoes that came from the curve of the earth. Jun Do tried to explain concepts like FedEx, and the men debated whether a parcel could really be sent between any two humans on earth in twenty-four hours.