Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son

“Desu ka,” Jun Do repeated.

The dog came running up with a yellow ball.

For a moment, the man didn’t move. Then he took a step backward.

“Get him,” Officer So shouted.

The man bolted, and Jun Do gave chase in wet jeans, his shoes caked with sand. The dog was big and white, bounding with excitement. The Japanese man ran straight down the beach, nearly invisible but for the dog moving from one side of him to the other. Jun Do ran for all he was worth. He focused only on the heartbeat-like thumps of feet padding ahead in the sand. Then he closed his eyes. In the tunnels, Jun Do had developed a sense of people he couldn’t see. If they were out there, he could feel it, and if he could get within range, he could home in on them. His father, the Orphan Master, had always given him a sense that his mother was dead, but that wasn’t true, she was alive and well, just out of range. And while he’d never heard news of what happened to the Orphan Master, Jun Do could feel that his father was no longer in this world. The key to fighting in the dark was no different: you had to perceive your opponent, sense him, and never use your imagination. The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

From ahead came the body thud of someone falling in the dark, a sound Jun Do had heard a thousand times. Jun Do pulled up where the man was righting himself. His face was ghostly with a dusting of sand. They were huffing and puffing, their joined breath white in the dark.

The truth was that Jun Do never did that well in tournaments. When you fought in the dark, a jab only told your opponent where you were. In the dark, you had to punch as if you were punching through people. Maximum extension is what mattered—haymaker punches and great, whirling roundhouse kicks that took out whole swaths of space and were meant to cut people down. In a tournament, though, opponents could see moves like that coming from a mile away. They simply stepped aside. But a man on a beach at night, standing on the balls of his feet? Jun Do executed a spinning back kick to the head, and the stranger went down.

The dog was filled with energy—excitement perhaps, or frustration. It pawed at the sand near the unconscious man, then dropped its ball. Jun Do wanted to throw the ball, but he didn’t dare get near those teeth. Its tail, Jun Do suddenly realized, wasn’t wagging. Jun Do saw a glint in the dark, the man’s glasses, it turned out. He put them on, and the fuzzy glow above the dunes turned into crisp points of light in people’s windows. Instead of huge housing blocks, the Japanese lived in smaller, individual-sized barracks.

Jun Do pocketed the glasses, then took up the man’s ankles and began pulling from behind. The dog was growling and giving short, aggressive barks. When Jun Do looked over his shoulder, the dog was growling in the man’s face and using its paws to scratch his cheeks and forehead. Jun Do lowered his head and pulled. The first day in a tunnel is no problem, but when you wake on the second day from the darkness of a dream into true darkness, that’s when your eyes must open. If you keep your eyes closed, your mind will show you all kinds of crazy movies, like a dog attacking you from behind. But with your eyes open, all you had to face was the nothingness of what you were really doing.

When finally Jun Do found the boat in the dark, he let the dead weight fall into its aluminum cross members. The man opened his eyes once and rolled them around, but there was no comprehension.

“What did you do to his face?” Gil asked.

“Where were you?” Jun Do asked. “That guy was heavy.”

“I’m just the translator,” Gil said.

Officer So clapped Jun Do on the back. “Not bad for an orphan,” he said.

Jun Do wheeled on him. “I’m not a fucking orphan,” he said. “And who the hell are you, saying you’ve done this a hundred times. We come out here with no plan, just me running someone down? You didn’t even get out of the boat.”

“I had to see what you were made of,” Officer So said. “Next time we’ll use our brains.”

“There won’t be any next time,” Jun Do said.

Gil and Jun Do spun the boat to face the waves. They got battered while Officer So pull-started the motor. When the four of them were in and headed toward open water, Officer So said, “Look, it gets easier. Just don’t think about it. I was full of shit when I said I’d kidnapped twenty-seven people. I never kept count. As they come just forget about them, one after another. Catch somebody with your hands, then let them go with your mind. Do the opposite of keeping count.”

Even over the outboard, they could hear that dog on the beach. No matter how far out they got, its baying carried over the water, and Jun Do knew he’d hear that dog forever.

They stayed at a Songun base, not far from the port of Kinjye. It was surrounded by the earthen bunkers of surface-to-air missiles, and when the sun set, they could see the white rails of launchers glowing in the moonlight. Because they’d been to Japan now, they had to bunk apart from the regular KPA soldiers. The three were housed in the infirmary, a small room with six cots. The only sign it was an infirmary was a lone cabinet filled with blood-taking instruments and an old Chinese refrigerator with a red cross on its door.

They’d locked the Japanese man in one of the hot boxes in the drill yard, and Gil was out there now, practicing his Japanese through the slop hole in the door. Jun Do and Officer So leaned against the infirmary’s window frame, sharing a cigarette as they watched Gil out there, sitting in the dirt, polishing his idioms with a man he’d helped kidnap. Officer So shook his head, like now he’d seen it all. There was one patient in the infirmary, a small soldier of about sixteen, bones knit from the famine. He lay on a cot, teeth chattering. Their cigarette smoke was giving him coughing fits. They moved his cot as far away as possible in the small room, but still he wouldn’t shut up.

There was no doctor. The infirmary was just a place where sick soldiers were housed until it was clear they wouldn’t recover. If the young soldier hadn’t improved by morning, the MPs would hook up a blood line and drain four units from him. Jun Do had seen it before, and as far as he could tell, it was the best way to go. It only took a couple of minutes—first they got sleepy, then a little dreamy looking, and if there was a last little panic at the end, it didn’t matter because they couldn’t talk anymore, and finally, before lights out, they looked pleasantly confused, like a cricket with its feelers pulled off.

The camp generator shut down—slowly the lights dimmed, the fridge went quiet.

Officer So and Jun Do took to their cots.

There was a Japanese man. He took his dog for a walk. And then he was nowhere. For the people who knew him, he’d forever be nowhere. That’s how Jun Do had thought of boys selected by the men with Chinese accents. They were here and then they were nowhere, taken like Bo Song to parts unknown. That’s how he’d thought of most people—appearing in your life like foundlings on the doorstep, only to be swept away later as if by flood. But Bo Song hadn’t gone nowhere—whether he sank down to the wolf eels or bloated and took the tide north to Vladivostok, he went somewhere. The Japanese man wasn’t nowhere, either—he was in the hot box, right out there in the drill grounds. And Jun Do’s mother, it now struck him—she was somewhere, at this very moment, in a certain apartment in the capital, perhaps, looking in a mirror, brushing her hair before bed.

For the first time in years, Jun Do closed his eyes and let himself recall her face. It was dangerous to dream up people like that. If you did, they’d soon be in the tunnel with you. That had happened many times when he remembered boys from Long Tomorrows. One slip and a boy was suddenly following you in the dark. He was saying things to you, asking why you weren’t the one who succumbed to the cold, why you weren’t the one who fell in the paint vat, and you’d get the feeling that at any moment, the toes of a front kick would cross your face.