Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son

But there she was, his mother. Lying there, listening to the shivering of the soldier, her voice came to him. “Arirang,” she sang, her voice achy, at the edge of a whisper, coming from an unknown somewhere. Even those fucking orphans knew where their parents were.

Late in the night, Gil stumbled in. He opened the fridge, which was forbidden, and placed something inside. Then he flopped onto his cot. Gil slept with his arms and legs sprawled off the edges, and Jun Do could tell that as a child, Gil must’ve had a bed of his very own. In a moment, he was out.

Jun Do and Officer So stood in the dark and went to the fridge. When Officer So pulled its handle, it exhaled a faint, cool breath. In the back, behind stacks of square blood bags, Officer So fished out a half-full bottle of shoju . They closed the door quickly because the blood was bound for Pyongyang, and if it spoiled, there’d be hell to pay.

They took the bottle to the window. Far in the distance, dogs were barking in their warrens. On the horizon, above the SAM bunkers, there was a glow in the sky, moonlight reflecting off the ocean. Behind them, Gil began gassing in his sleep.

Officer So drank. “I don’t think old Gil’s used to a diet of millet cakes and sorghum soup.”

“Who the hell is he?” Jun Do asked.

“Forget about him,” Officer So said. “I don’t know why Pyongyang started this business up again after all these years, but hopefully we’ll be rid of him in a week. One mission, and if everything goes right, we’ll never see that guy again.”

Jun Do took a drink—his stomach clutching at the fruit, the alcohol.

“What’s the mission?” he asked.

“First, another practice run,” Officer So said. “Then we’re going after a special someone. The Tokyo Opera spends its summers in Niigata. There’s a soprano. Her name is Rumina.”

The next drink of shoju went down smooth. “Opera?” Jun Do asked.

Officer So shrugged. “Some bigshot in Pyongyang probably heard a bootleg and had to have her.”

“Gil said he survived a land-mine tour,” Jun Do said. “For that, they sent him to language school. Is it true—does it work like that, do you get rewarded?”

“We’re stuck with Gil, okay? But you don’t listen to him. You listen to me.”

Jun Do was quiet.

“Why, you got your heart set on something?” Officer So asked. “You even know what you’d want as a reward?”

Jun Do shook his head.

“Then don’t worry about it.”

Officer So walked to the corner and leaned over the latrine bucket. He braced himself against the wall and strained for a long time. Nothing happened.

“I pulled off a miracle or two in my day,” he said. “I got rewarded. Now look at me.” He shook his head. “The reward you want is this: don’t become me.”

Jun Do stared out the window at the hot box. “What’s going to happen to him?”

“The dog man?” Officer So asked. “There are probably a couple of Pubyok on the train from Pyongyang right now to get him.”

“Yeah, but what’s going to happen to him?”

Officer So tried one last push to get some urine out.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” he said through his teeth.

Jun Do thought of his mother on a train to Pyongyang. “For your reward, could you ask for a person?”

“What, a woman?” Officer So shook his umkyoung in frustration. “Yeah, you could ask for that.” He came back and drank the rest of the bottle, saving only a swish in the bottom. This he poured, a dribble at a time, over the dying soldier’s lips. Officer So clapped him good-bye on the chest, then he stuffed the empty bottle in the crook of the boy’s sweat-soaked arm.

They commandeered a new fishing boat, made another crossing. Over the Tsushima Basin, they could hear the powerful clicks, like punches to the chest, of sperm whales hunting below, and nearing the island of Dogo, granite spires rose sudden from the sea, white up top from bird guano and orange below from great gatherings of starfish. Jun Do stared up toward the island’s north promontory, volcanic black, limned in dwarf spruce. This was a world wrought for its own sake, without message or point, a landscape that would make no testimony for one great leader over another.

There was a famous resort on this island, and Officer So thought they could catch a tourist alone on the beach. But when they reached the lee of the island, there was an empty boat on the water, a black Avon inflatable, six-man, with a fifty-horse Honda outboard. They took the skiff over to investigate. The Avon was abandoned, not a soul upon the waters. They climbed aboard, and Officer So started the Honda engine. He shut it down. He pulled the gas can out of the skiff, and together they rolled it in the water—it filled quickly, going down ass-first with the weight of the Vpresna.

“Now we’re a proper team,” Officer So said as they admired their new boat.

That’s when the diver surfaced.

Lifting his mask, the diver showed a look of uncertain wonder to discover three men in his boat. But he handed up a sack of abalone and took Gil’s hand to help him aboard. The diver was larger than them, muscular in a wetsuit.

Officer So spoke to Gil, “Tell him our boat was damaged, that it sank.”

Gil spoke to the diver, who gestured wildly and laughed.

“I know your boat sank,” Gil translated back. “It almost landed on my head.”

Then the diver noticed the fishing vessel in the distance. He cocked his head at it.

Gil clapped the diver on the back and said something to him. The diver stared hard into Gil’s eyes and then panicked. Abalone divers, it turned out, carried a special kind of knife on their ankles, and Jun Do was a long time in subduing him. Finally, Jun Do took the diver’s back and began to squeeze, the water wringing from his wetsuit as the scissors choke sank in.

When the knife was flying, Gil had jumped overboard.

“What the fuck did you say to him?” Jun Do demanded.

“The truth,” Gil said, treading water.

Officer So had caught a pretty good gash in the forearm. He closed his eyes at the pain of it. “More practice,” is all he could say.

They put the diver in the fishing boat’s hold and continued to the mainland. That night, offshore from the town of Fukura, they put the Avon in the water. Next to Fukura’s long fishing pier, a summer amusement park had set up, with lanterns strung and old people singing karaoke on a public stage. Here Jun Do and Gil and Officer So hovered beyond the beach break, waiting for the neon piping on the roller coaster to go dark, for the monkeyish organ music of the midway to fall silent. Finally, a solitary figure stood at the end of the pier. When they saw the red of a cigarette, they knew it was a man. Officer So started the engine.

They motored in on idle, the pier towering as they came astern it. Where its pilings entered the heavy surf, there was chaos, with some waves leaping straight up and others deflecting out perpendicular to shore.

“Use your Japanese,” Officer So told Gil. “Tell him you lost your puppy or something. Get close. Then—over the rail. It’s a long fall, and the water’s cold. When he comes up, he’ll be fighting to get in the boat.”

Gil stepped out when they reached the beach. “I’ve got it,” he said. “This one’s mine.”

“Oh, no,” Officer So said. “You both go.”

“Seriously,” Gil said. “I think I can handle it.”

“Out,” Officer So said to Jun Do. “And wear those damn glasses.”

The two of them crossed the tide line and came to a small square. Here were benches and a little plaza, a shuttered tea stand. There seemed to be no statue, and they could not tell what the square glorified. The trees were full with plums, so ripe the skins broke and juice ran in their hands. It seemed impossible, a thing not to be trusted. A grubby man was sleeping on a bench, and they marveled at it, a person sleeping any place he wished.