Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“Yeah,” he said.

“Then put them on,” she told him.

The way you dig into a boot for old sticky toes is the way you spring a trapdoor in a DMZ tunnel or pull a stranger off a beach in Japan: you just take that breath and go. Closing his eyes, Jun Do breathed deeply and reached inside the dank boots, sweeping his fingers back and forth, feeling all the way in. Finally, he turned his wrist so he could scrape out the depths, and he removed what he had to remove. It left a scowl on his face.

He turned to the medics, to the guard, to the doomed half-dead.

“I was a model citizen,” he told them. “I was a hero of the state,” he added, and then stepped through the door in his new boots, out into a matterless place, and from this point forward nothing further is known of the citizen named Pak Jun Do.

WE WERE finalizing a month-long interrogation of a professor from Kaesong when a rumor spread through the building that Commander Ga had been apprehended and was here, in custody, in our own Division 42. Right away, we sent the interns, Q-Kee and Jujack, upstairs to processing to see if this was true. Certainly we were dying to get our eyes on Commander Ga, especially after all the stories that had been flying around Pyongyang lately. Could it be the same Commander Ga who’d won the Golden Belt, who’d bested Kimura in Japan, who’d rid the military of homosexuals and then married our nation’s actress?

But our work with the professor was at a critical stage and couldn’t be abandoned for a little celebrity gawking. The professor’s was a textbook case, really: he had been accused of counterrevolutionary teachings, specifically using an illegal radio to play South Korean pop songs to his students. It was a silly charge, probably just the work of a rival at his university. Such things are hard to prove one way or another. Most people in North Korea work in pairs, so there is always a co-worker ready to give evidence or denounce his partner. Not so with a professor, whose classroom is his own domain. It would’ve been easy to get the professor to confess, but that’s not us, we don’t work that way. You see, Division 42 is really two divisions.

Our rival interrogation team is the Pubyok, named after the “floating wall” defenders that saved Pyongyang from invaders in 1136. There are only a dozen or so Pubyok left, old men with silver crewcuts who walk in a row like a wall and truly believe they can float, stealthy as ghosts, from one citizen to the next, interrogating them as a wind interrogates the leaves. They are constantly breaking their hands, on the principle that the bones grow back stronger, knitting in extra layers. It is a terrible thing to see, old men, out of nowhere, cracking their hands on doorjambs or the rims of fire barrels. The Pubyok all gather ’round when one is about to break a hand, and the rest of us, the thinking, principled remainder of Division 42, have to look away. Junbi , they say, almost softly, then count hana , dul , set and shout Sijak! Then there’s the weirdly dead sound of a hand striking the edge of a car door. The Pubyok believe that all subjects arriving at Division 42 should be met with brutality right away—senseless, extended, old-fashioned hurt.

And then there is my team—correction: our team, for it truly is a group effort. We have no need for a nickname, and sharp minds are our only interrogation tools. The Pubyok experienced either the war or its aftermath when they were young, and their ways are understandable. We pay respect to them, but interrogation is a science now, and long-term, consistent results are what matter. Thuggery has its place, we concede, but it should come tactically, at specific moments, over a long relationship. And pain—that towering white flower—can only be used once the way we apply it, complete, enduring, transformational pain, without cloak or guise. And since everyone on our team is a graduate of Kim Il Sung University, we have a soft spot for old professors, even our sad candidate from a regional college down in Kaesong.

In an interrogation bay, we reclined our professor into one of the Q & A chairs, which are amazingly comfortable. We have a contractor in Syria who makes them for us—they’re similar to dental chairs, with baby-blue leather and arm- and headrests. There’s a machine next to the chair, though, that makes people nervous. It’s called an autopilot. I suppose that’s our only other tool.

“I thought you had all you needed to know,” the professor said. “I answered the questions.”

“You were wonderful,” we told him. “Absolutely.”

Then we showed him the biography we’d made of his life. At 212 pages, it was the product of dozens of hours of interviews. It contained all of him, from his earliest memories—Party education, defining personal moments, achievements and failures, affairs with students, and so on, a complete documentation of his existence, right to his arrival at Division 42. He flipped through the book, impressed. We use a binding machine, the kind that seals the spines of doctoral dissertations, and it gives the biographies a real professional look. The Pubyok simply beat you until you confess to using a radio, whether there’s a radio or not. Our team discovers an entire life, with all its subtleties and motivations, and then crafts it into a single, original volume that contains the person himself. When you have a subject’s biography, there is nothing between the citizen and the state. That’s harmony, that’s the idea our nation is founded upon. Sure, some of our subject’s stories are sweeping and take months to record, but if there’s one commodity we have no shortage of in North Korea, it’s forever.

We hooked the professor up to the autopilot, and he looked quite surprised when the pain delivery began. The expression on his face conveyed a desperation to determine what we wanted from him, and how he could give it, but the biography was complete, there were no more questions. The professor watched in horror as I reached across his body to his shirt pocket, where I removed a gold pen clipped there—such an object can concentrate the electrical current, setting the clothes on fire. The professor’s eyes—they understood now that he was no longer a professor, that he would never have need of a pen again. It wasn’t long ago, when we were young, that people like the professor, probably with a handful of his students, would be shot in the soccer stadium on a Monday morning before work. While we were in college, the big trend was to throw them all into the prison mines, where life expectancy is six months. And of course now organ harvesting is where so many of our subjects meet their end.

It’s true that when the mines open their maw for more workers, everyone must go, we have no say over that. But people like the professor, we believe, have an entire life of happiness and labor to offer our nation. So we ramp up the pain to inconceivable levels, a shifting, muscular river of pain. Pain of this nature creates a rift in the identity—the person who makes it to the far shore will have little resemblance to the professor who now begins the crossing. In a few weeks, he will be a contributing member of a rural farm collective, and perhaps we can even find a widow to comfort him. There’s no way around it: to get a new life, you’ve got to trade in your old one.

For now, it was our little professor’s alone time. We set the autopilot, which monitors all of a subject’s vitals and brings the pain in modulated waves, and then we closed the soundproof door and made for the library. We’d see the professor again this afternoon, pupils dilated, teeth chattering, and help him step into his street clothes for the big trip to the countryside.