Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son

Gil took the binoculars, but instead of training them on the beach, he studied the tall buildings, the way the downtown neon came to life.

“I tell you,” Gil said. “There was no Arduous March in this place.”

Jun Do and Officer So exchanged a look.

Officer So said to Gil, “Tell him what ‘how are you’ was again.”

“Ogenki desu ka,” Gil said.

“Ogenki desu ka,” Jun Do repeated. “Ogenki desu ka.”

“Say it like ‘How are you, my fellow citizen?’ Ogenki desu ka ,” Officer So said. “Not like how are you, I’m about to pluck you off this fucking beach.”

Jun Do asked, “Is that what you call it, plucking?”

“A long time ago, that’s what we called it.” He put on a fake smile. “Just say it nice.”

Jun Do said, “Why not send Gil? He’s the one who speaks Japanese.”

Officer So returned his eyes to the water. “You know why you’re here.”

Gil asked, “Why’s he here?”

Officer So said, “Because he fights in the dark.”

Gil turned to Jun Do. “You mean that’s what you do, that’s your career?” he asked.

“I lead an incursion team,” Jun Do said. “Mostly we run in the dark, but yeah, there’s fighting, too.”

Gil said, “I thought my job was fucked up.”

“What was your job?” Jun Do asked.

“Before I went to language school?” Gil asked. “Land mines.”

“What, like defusing them?”

“I wish,” Gil said.

They closed within a couple hundred meters of shore, then trolled along the beaches of Kagoshima Prefecture. The more the light faded, the more intricately Jun Do could see it reflected in the architecture of each wave that rolled them.

Gil lifted his hand. “There,” he said. “There’s somebody on the beach. A woman.”

Officer So backed off the throttle and took the field glasses. He held them steady and fine-tuned them, his bushy white eyebrows lifting and falling as he focused. “No,” he said, handing the binoculars back to Gil. “Look closer, it’s two women. They’re walking together.”

Jun Do said, “I thought you were looking for a guy?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the old man said. “As long as the person’s alone.”

“What, we’re supposed to grab just anybody?”

Officer So didn’t answer. For a while, there was nothing but the sound of the Vpresna. Then Officer So said, “In my time, we had a whole division, a budget. I’m talking about a speedboat, a tranquilizing gun. We’d surveil, infiltrate, cherry-pick. We didn’t pluck family types, and we never took children. I retired with a perfect record. Now look at me. I must be the only one left. I’ll bet I’m the only one they could find who remembers this business.”

Gil fixed on something on the beach. He wiped the lenses of the binoculars, but really it was too dark to see anything. He handed them to Jun Do. “What do you make out?” he asked.

When Jun Do lifted the binoculars, he could barely discern a male figure moving along the beach, near the water—he was just a lighter blur against a darker blur, really. Then some motion caught Jun Do’s eye. An animal was racing down the beach toward the man—a dog it must’ve been, but it was big, the size of a wolf. The man did something and the dog ran away.

Jun Do turned to Officer So. “There’s a man. He’s got a dog with him.”

Officer So sat up and put a hand on the outboard engine. “Is he alone?”

Jun Do nodded.

“Is the dog an akita?”

Jun Do didn’t know his breeds. Once a week, the orphans had cleaned out a local dog farm. Dogs were filthy animals that would lunge for you at any opportunity—you could see where they’d attacked the posts of their pens, chewing through the wood with their fangs. That’s all Jun Do needed to know about dogs.

Officer So said, “As long as the thing wags its tail. That’s all you got to worry about.”

Gil said, “The Japanese train their dogs to do little tricks. Say to the dog, Nice doggie, sit. Yoshi yoshi. Osuwari kawaii desu ne. ”

Jun Do said, “Will you shut up with the Japanese?”

Jun Do wanted to ask if there was a plan, but Officer So simply turned them toward the shore. Back in Panmunjom, Jun Do was the leader of his tunnel squad, so he had a liquor ration and a weekly credit for one of the women. In three days, he had the quarterfinals of the KPA taekwondo tournament.

Jun Do’s squad swept every tunnel under the DMZ once a month, and they worked without lights, which meant jogging for kilometers in complete darkness, using their red lights only when they reached a tunnel’s end and needed to inspect its seals and trip wires. They worked as if they might encounter the South Koreans at any point, and except for the rainy season, when the tunnels were too muddy to use, they trained daily in zero-light hand to hand. It was said that the ROK soldiers had infrared and American night-vision goggles. The only weapon Jun Do’s boys had was the dark.

When the waves got rough, and he felt panicky, Jun Do turned to Gil. “So what’s this job that’s worse than disarming land mines?”

“Mapping them,” Gil said.

“What, with a sweeper?”

“Metal detectors don’t work,” Gil said. “The Americans use plastic mines now. We made maps of where they probably were, using psychology and terrain. When a path forces a step or tree roots direct your feet, that’s where we assume a mine and mark it down. We’d spend all night in a minefield, risking our lives with every step, and for what? Come morning, the mines were still there, the enemy was still there.”

Jun Do knew who got the worst jobs—tunnel recon, twelve-man submarines, mines, biochem—and he suddenly saw Gil differently. “So you’re an orphan,” he said.

Gil looked shocked. “Not at all. Are you?”

“No,” Jun Do said. “Not me.”

Jun Do’s own unit was made up of orphans, though in Jun Do’s case it was a mistake. The address on his KPA card had been Long Tomorrows, and that’s what had condemned him. It was a glitch no one in North Korea seemed capable of fixing, and now, this was his fate. He’d spent his life with orphans, he understood their special plight, so he didn’t hate them like most people did. He just wasn’t one of them.

“And you’re a translator now?” Jun Do asked him.

“You work the minefields long enough,” Gil said, “and they reward you. They send you someplace cushy like language school.”

Officer So laughed a bitter little laugh.

The white foam of the breakers was sweeping into the boat now.

“The shitty thing is,” Gil said, “when I’m walking down the street, I’ll think, That’s where I’d put a land mine . Or I’ll find myself not stepping on certain places, like door thresholds or in front of a urinal. I can’t even go to a park anymore.”

“A park?” Jun Do asked. He’d never seen a park.

“Enough,” Officer So said. “It’s time to get that language school a new Japanese teacher.” He throttled back and the surf grew loud, the skiff turning sideways in the waves.

They could see the outline of a man on the beach watching them, but they were helpless now, just twenty meters from shore. When Jun Do felt the boat start to go over, he leaped out to steady it, and though it was only waist deep, he went down hard in the waves. The tide rolled him along the sandy bottom before he came up coughing.

The man on the beach didn’t say anything. It was almost dark as Jun Do waded ashore.

Jun Do took a deep breath, then wiped the water from his hair.

“Konban wa,” he said to the stranger. “Odenki kesu da.”

“Ogenki desu ka,” Gil called from the boat.