Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

The vehicles on the runway were Soviet Tsirs, three of them. The crows were all manufactured in Chongjin, at the Sungli 58 factory, so Jun Do had seen thousands of them. They were used to move troops and cargo, and they had hauled many an orphan. In the rainy season, a Tsir was the only thing that could move at all.

Dr. Song refused to look at the crows or their drivers smoking together on the running boards. He smiled broadly and greeted the two men who were there to debrief them. But the Minister, grim faced, couldn’t stop staring, at the tall truck tires, the drum fuel tanks. Jun Do suddenly understood that if someone were to be transported from Pyongyang to a prison camp, only a crow could get you over the bad mountain roads.

Jun Do could see the giant portrait of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung atop the airport terminal. But the two debriefers led them in a different direction—past a group of women in jumpsuits who faced a pile of shovels as they did their morning calisthenics and past a plane whose fuselage lay on the ground, blowtorched into four sections. Old men seated on buckets were stripping the copper wire from it.

They came to an empty hangar, voluminous inside. Potholes in the cement floor were pooled with muddy water. There were several mechanics’ bays filled with tools, lifts, and workbenches, and Dr. Song, the Minister, and Jun Do were each placed in one, just out of sight of one another.

Jun Do sat at a table with the debriefers, who began going through his things.

“Tell us about your trip,” one said. “And don’t leave anything out.”

There was a hooded typewriter on the table, but they made no move to use it.

At first, Jun Do only mentioned the things they’d agreed upon—the indignities of dogs, the paper plates, of eating under the hot sun. As he spoke, the two men opened his bourbon and, drinking, both approved. They divided his cigarettes right in front of him. They seemed especially fond of the little flashlight, and they interrupted him to make sure he wasn’t hiding another. They tasted his beef jerky, tried on his calfskin gloves.

“Start again,” the other one told him. “And say it all.”

He kept listing the humiliations—how there was no band at the airport, no red carpet, how Tommy had left his spoor in the backseat. Like animals, they had been made to eat with their bare hands. He tried to remember how many bullets had been fired from the old guns. He described the old cars. Did he mention the dog in his bed? Could he have a glass of water? No time, they said, soon this would be over.

One debriefer turned the DVD in his hand. “Is this high definition?” he asked.

The other debriefer waved him off. “Forget it,” he said. “That movie’s black-and-white.”

They snapped several pictures with the camera, but could find no way to view them.

“It’s broken,” Jun Do said.

“And these?” they asked, holding up the antibiotics.

“Female pills,” Jun Do told them.

“You’ll have to give us your story,” one of them said. “We’ll need to get all of it down. We’re going to be right back, but while we’re gone, you should practice. We’ll be listening, we’ll be able to hear everything you say.”

“Start to finish,” the other man said.

“Where do I start?” Jun Do asked him. Did the story of his trip to Texas begin when the car came for him or when he was declared a hero or when the Second Mate drifted off into the waves? And finish? He had a horrible feeling that this story was nowhere near finished.

“Practice,” the debriefer said.

Together, they left the repair bay, and then he could hear the muffled echoes of the Minister now telling his story. “A car came for me,” Jun Do said aloud. “It was morning. The ships in the harbor were drying their nets. The car was a Mercedes, four-door, with two men driving. It had windshield wipers and a factory radio …”

He spoke to the rafters. Up there, he could see birds bobbing their heads as they looked down upon him. The more detailed he made his story, the more strange and unbelievable it seemed to him. Had Wanda really served him iced lemonade? Had the dog actually brought him a rib bone after his shower?

When the debriefers returned, Jun Do had only recited his story to the part about first opening the cooler of tiger meat on the plane. One of them was listening to the Minister’s iPod, and the other one looked upset. For some reason, Jun Do’s mouth went back to the script. “There was a dog on the bed,” he said. “We were forced to cut brush, the seat had been spoored.”

“You sure you don’t have one of these?” one asked, holding up the iPod.

“Maybe he’s hiding it.”

“Is that true? Are you hiding it?”

“The cars were ancient,” Jun Do said. “The guns dangerously old.”

The first story kept coming back into his mind, and he became paranoid that he might accidentally say that the phone had rung four times and the Senator had said three words into it. Then he remembered that was wrong, the phone had rung three times, and the Senator had spoken four words, and then Jun Do tried to clear his mind because that was wrong, the phone never rang, the American President didn’t call at all.

“Hey, snap out of it,” one of the debriefers said. “We asked the old man where his camera was, and he said he didn’t know what we were talking about. You all got the same gloves and cigarettes and everything.”

“There’s nothing else,” Jun Do said. “You’ve got everything I own.”

“We’ll see what the third guys says.”

They handed him a piece of paper and a pen.

“It’s time to get it down,” they said, and left the bay again.

Jun Do picked up the pen. “A car came for me,” he wrote, but the pen barely had any ink in it. He decided to skip to when they were already in Texas. He shook the pen and added, “And took me to a boot store.” He knew the pen only had one more sentence in it. By pressing hard he scratched out, “Here my humiliations began.”

Jun Do lifted the paper and read his two-sentence story. Dr. Song had said that what mattered in North Korea was not the man but his story—what did it mean, then, when his story was nothing, just a suggestion of a life?

One of the crow drivers entered the hangar. He came to Jun Do, asked him, “You the guy I’m taking?”

“Taking where?” Jun Do asked.

A debriefer came over. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

“My headlights are shot,” the driver said. “I have to go now or I’ll never make it.”

The debriefer turned to Jun Do. “Look, your story checks out,” he said. “You’re free to go.”

Jun Do lifted the paper. “This is all I got,” he said. “The pen ran out of ink.”

The debriefer said, “All that matters is that you got something. We sent your actual paperwork in already. This is just a personal statement. I don’t know why they make us get them.”

“Do I need to sign it?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” the debriefer said. “Yes, let’s make it official. Here, use my pen.”

He handed Jun Do the pen Dr. Song had been given from the mayor of Vladivostok.

The pen wrote beautifully—he hadn’t signed his name since language school.

“Better take him now,” the debriefer told the driver. “Or he’ll be here all day. The one old guy asked for extra paper.” He gave the driver a pack of American Spirit cigarettes, then asked the driver if he had the medics with him.

“Yeah, they’re in the truck,” the driver said.

The debriefer handed Jun Do his DVD of Casablanca and his camera and his pills. He led Jun Do to the hangar door. “These guys are headed east,” he told Jun Do. “And you’re going to catch a ride with them. Those medics are on a mission of mercy, they’re true heroes of the people, those guys, the hospitals in the capital need them like you can’t believe. So if they need help, you help them, I don’t want to hear later that you were being lazy or selfish—you got that?”