Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Jun Do nodded. At the door, though, he looked back. He couldn’t see Dr. Song or the Minister, the way they were tucked back in the repair bays, but he could hear Dr. Song’s voice, clear and precise. “It was a most fascinating journey,” Dr. Song was saying. “Never to be repeated.”

Nine hours in the back of a crow. The washboard road rattled his guts, the engine vibrated so much he couldn’t tell where his flesh ended and the wooden bench began. When he tried to move, to piss through the slats to the dirt road below, his muscles wouldn’t answer. His tailbone had gone from numb to fire to dumb. Dust filled the canopy, gravel shot up through the transaxles, and his life returned to enduring.

Also in the back of the truck were two men. They sat on either side of a large white cooler, and they wore no insignia or uniform. They were particularly dead-eyed, and of all the shit jobs on earth, Jun Do thought, these guys had it the worst. Still, he tried to make small talk.

“So, are you guys medics?” he asked them.

The truck hit a rock. The lid of the cooler lifted, and a wave of pink ice water sloshed out.

He tried again, “The guy at the airport said you two were real heroes of the people.”

They wouldn’t look at him. The poor bastards, Jun Do thought. He’d choose a land-mine crew before being tasked out to a blood-harvesting detail. He only hoped they’d get him east to Kinjye before they made a stop to practice their trade, and he distracted himself by thinking of the gentle motion of the Junma , of cigarettes and small talk with the Captain, of the moment he turned the dials and his radios came to life.

They breezed through all the checkpoints. How the soldiers manning them could tell that a blood team was on board, Jun Do couldn’t figure, but he wouldn’t want to stop their truck either. Jun Do noticed for the first time that spinning in eddies of wind through the floorboards were the shells of hard-boiled eggs, a dozen of them, perhaps. This was too many eggs for a single person to eat, and nobody would share their eggs with a stranger, so it must have been a family. Through the back of the truck, Jun Do watched crop-security towers flash past, a local cadre in each with an old rifle to guard the corn terraces from the farmers who tended them. He saw dump trucks filled with peasants on their way to help with construction projects. And the roads were lined with conscripts bearing huge rocks on their shoulders to shore up washed-out sections. Yet this was happy work compared with the camps. He thought of whole families being carried off together to such destinations. If children had sat where he sat, if old people had occupied this bench, then absolutely no one was safe—one day a truck like this might come for him, too. The cast-off eggshells spun like tops in the wind. There was something carefree and whimsical about their movement. When the shells drifted near Jun Do’s feet, he stomped them.

It was late afternoon when the truck descended into a river valley. On the near shore was a large encampment—thousands of people living in mud and squalor to be close to their loved ones on the other side. Across the bridge, everything changed. Through a flap in the black canvas, Jun Do could see harmonica-style barracks, hundreds of them, housing thousands of people, and soon the stink of distilling soy was in the air. The truck passed a crowd of small boys stripping the bark from a stack of yew branches. They had only their teeth to start the cut, their nails to peel back a flap, and their little biceps to then rip the branch clean. Normally, a sight like this would reassure him, make him feel comfortable. But Jun Do had seen no living boy so sinewy, and they moved faster than the Long Tomorrows orphans ever had.

The gates were a simple affair: there was one man to throw a large electrical switch while another wheeled back an electrified section of fencing. The medics removed old surgical gloves from their pockets, ones that had clearly been used many times, and pulled them on. They parked by a dark wooden building. The medics jumped out and told Jun Do to carry the cooler. But he didn’t move. His legs were filled with static, and he sat there, watching a woman rolling a tire past the back of the truck. Both of her legs were missing below the knee. She had a pair of work boots that she’d fashioned to wear backward, so that her short stumps went into the boots’ toe boxes while her knees were planted in the heels. The boots were laced up tight, and she was surprisingly nimble in them, swinging her short legs in circles in pursuit of the tire.

One of the medics picked up a handful of dirt and threw it in Jun Do’s face. His eyes filled with grit and welled over. He wanted to kick that punk’s head off. But this was not the place to make a mistake or do anything stupid. Besides, it was all he could do to swing his legs off the back of the truck and keep his balance while he hefted the cooler. No, it was best to get this over with and get out of here.

He followed the medics into a processing center, where there were dozens of infirmary cots filled with people who seemed on both sides of the edge of death. Listless and murmuring, they were like the fish at the bottom of the hold, offering no more than one last twitch of a gill when the knife came down. He saw the inward gaze of a heavy fever, the yellow-green skin of organ failure, and wounds that lacked only blood to keep bleeding. Spookiest of all, he couldn’t tell the men from the women.

Jun Do dropped the cooler on a table. His eyes were on fire, and trying to wipe them clean with his shirt only made them burn more. He had no choice. Opening the cooler, he used the blood-laced ice water to splash the dirt from his eyes. There was a guard in the room, sitting on a crate and leaning against the wall. He threw his cigarette away to accept an American Spirit cigarette from the medics. Jun Do came up to get a cigarette, too.

A medic turned to the guard. “Who is this guy?” he asked, indicating Jun Do.

The guard inhaled deep on his fancy cigarette. “Someone important enough to arrive on a Sunday,” he said.

“They’re my cigarettes,” Jun Do said, and the medic reluctantly gave him one.

The smoke was rich and smooth, and it was worth a little eye sting. An old woman entered the room. She was thin and bent and wore strips of cloth wrapped around her hands. She had a large camera on a wooden tripod that looked exactly like the one the Japanese photographer was using when they kidnapped her.

“There she is,” the guard said. “Time to get to work.”

The medics began tearing strips of tape in preparation.

He was about to witness the darkest of trades, but the cigarette calmed him.

Just then, something caught his eye. He looked up to the blank wall above the doorway. It was completely empty—there was simply nothing there. He pulled the camera from his pocket. And while the guard and the medics were discussing the merits of various tobacco brands, Jun Do snapped a picture of the empty white wall. Understand that , Wanda , he thought. Never in his life had he been in a room without portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il above the door. Not in the lowliest orphanage, not in the oldest train car, not even in the burned-out shitter of the Junma . Never had he been in a place that did not merit the gaze of the Dear and Great Leaders’ constant concern. The place he was in, he knew now, was below mattering—it didn’t even exist.

While he was pocketing his camera, he caught the old woman staring at him. Her eyes were like those of the Senator’s wife—he felt she was seeing something he didn’t even know about himself.

One of the medics yelled at Jun Do to grab a crate from the corner, where there was a stack of them. Jun Do took a crate and met the medic at the bedside of a woman who had her jaw tied shut with strips of cloth that circled her head. One medic began unlacing her shoes, which were just rotten tire treads wrapped with wire. The other began unwrapping tubing and intravenous lines, all precious medical supplies.