Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Jun Do touched the woman’s skin, which was cool.

“I think we’re too late,” he told them.

The medics ignored him. They each ran a line into a vein in the tops of her feet, then attached two empty blood bags. The old photographer appeared with her camera. She called to the guard for the woman’s name, and when he told her, the photographer wrote it on a gray slate and placed it on the woman’s chest. Then the photographer unwound the strips of cloth from the woman’s head. When the photographer removed the woman’s cap, most of her hair came off with it, lining it with a black swirl.

“Here,” the photographer said, slipping the cap to Jun Do. “Take it.”

The cap looked heavy with ground-in grease. Jun Do hesitated.

“Do you know who I am?” the old photographer asked. “I’m Mongnan. I take the pictures of all who arrive and depart from this place.” She shook the cap insistently. “It’s wool. You’ll need it.”

Jun Do pocketed the cap as a way to shut her up, to stop her and her crazy talk.

When Mongnan took the woman’s picture, the flash awakened her for a moment. She reached from the cot to Jun Do’s wrist and clenched it. In her eyes was a very clear desire to take him with her. The medics yelled at Jun Do to lift the head of the cot. When he did so, they kicked the crate underneath, and soon the four blood bags were filling nicely.

Jun Do said to the medics, “We’d better work fast. It’s getting dark, and that driver said he doesn’t have headlights.”

The medics ignored him.

The next person was a teenager, his chest cool and pale blue. His eyes were drawn, so that they turned with labor, in increments. One of his arms hung off the cot, outstretched to the rough-hewn floorboards.

“What’s your name?” Mongnan asked him.

His mouth kept making a motion as though he was trying to wet his lips before speaking, but the words never came.

Soft and tender, with the voice of a mother, she whispered to the dying boy.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and when he did she snapped the photo.

The medics used the strips of medical tape to secure the blood lines, and the process repeated itself. Jun Do lifted the cot and slid the next crate under it, the boy’s head gently lolled, and then Jun Do was left carrying the warm bags to the cooler. The life of the boy, the true life of him, had literally drained warm into these bags that Jun Do held, and it was like the boy was still alive in the bags until Jun Do personally snuffed him by dropping them into the ice water. For some reason, he expected the warm bags of blood to float, but they sank to the bottom.

Mongnan whispered to Jun Do, “Find a pair of boots.”

Jun Do gave her a wary look but did as he was told.

There was only one man with boots that might fit. The uppers had been patched many times, but the soles were from a pair of military boots. In his sleep, the man made a croaking noise, as if bubbles kept rising up his throat to pop in his mouth.

“Get them,” Mongnan said.

Jun Do began unlacing the boots. They wouldn’t make him put on a pair of work boots unless they had another ugly task in store for him—he could only hope it wasn’t burying all these fucking people.

While Jun Do was wriggling the man’s boots off, he woke. “Water,” he said, before he could even open his eyes. Jun Do froze, hoping the man wouldn’t come to. But the guy found his focus. “Are you a doctor?” the man asked. “An ore cart tipped over—I can’t feel my legs.”

“I’m just helping out,” Jun Do said, and it was true, when the boots slipped off, the man seemed not to notice. The man wore no socks. Several of his toes were blackened and broken, and some were missing, with the remaining stubs leaking a tea-colored juice.

“Are my legs okay?” the man asked. “I can’t feel them.”

Jun Do took the boots and backed away, back to where Mongnan had her camera set up.

Jun Do shook the boots and clapped them together, but no toes fell out. Jun Do lifted each boot and peeled back its tongue in an effort to peer as deep inside as he could—but he could see nothing. He hoped the missing toes had fallen off someplace else.

Mongnan raised the tripod to Jun Do’s height. She handed him a little gray slate and a chalk stone. “Write your name and date of birth.”

Pak Jun Do, he wrote, for the second time in one day.

“My birth date is unknown,” he told her.

He felt like a child when he lifted the slate to his chin, like a little boy. He thought, Why is she taking my picture? but he didn’t ask this.

Mongnan pressed a button and when the flash went off, everything seemed different. He was on the other side of the bright light now, and that’s where all the bloodless people on cots were—on the other side of her flash.

The medics yelled at him to lift a cot.

“Ignore them,” she said. “When they’re done, they’re going to sleep in the truck, and in the morning, they’re going home. You, we’ve got to take care of you before it’s too dark.”

Mongnan called to the guard for the barracks number of Pak Jun Do. When he told her, she wrote it on the back of his hand. “We don’t usually get people on Sundays,” she said. “You’re kind of on your own. First thing is to find your barracks. You need to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s Monday—the guards are hell on Monday.”

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I don’t have time to bury anybody.”

She lifted his hand and showed him the barracks number written across the back of his knuckles. “Hey,” she said. “This is you now. You’re in my camera. Those are now your boots.”

She started walking him toward a door. Over his shoulder, he looked for the pictures of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. A flash of panic struck him. Where were they when he needed them?

“Hey,” one of the medics said. “We’re not done with him.”

“Go,” Mongnan said. “I’ll handle this.”

“Find your barracks,” she said. “Before it’s too dark. ”

“But then. What do I do then?”

“Do what everyone else does,” she said, and pulled from her pocket a milky white ball of corn kernels. This she gave to him. “If people eat fast, you eat fast. If they drop their eyes when someone comes around, so do you. If they denounce a prisoner, you chime in.”

When Jun Do opened the door, boots in hand, he looked out onto the dark camp, rising in every direction into the icy canyons of a huge mountain range, its peaks still visible in the last of the setting sun. He could see the glowing mouths of the mineheads and the torchy flicker of workers moving within. Ore carts pushed forth from them under human power, strobing from security lights that reflected off the slag ponds. Everywhere, cooking fires cast an orange glow upon the harmonica houses, and the acrid smoke of green firewood made him cough. He didn’t know where this prison was. He didn’t even know its name.

“Don’t let anyone see you use that camera,” Mongnan told him. “I’ll come find you in a couple days.”

He closed his eyes. It seemed he could make out the plaintive groans of roofing metal in the evening wind, of nails squeaking in the grip of contracting wood, of human bones stiffening and hardening on thirty thousand bunks. He could hear the slow swivel of searchlight tripods and he could make out the hum of electricity charging perimeter wires and the icy crackle of ceramic insulators on their poles. And soon he would be in the center of it, in the belly of the ship once again, but this time, there would be no surface, no hatch, just the slow endless pitch of everything to come.

Mongnan indicated the boots in his hand. “They’ll try to get those from you. Can you fight?”