Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Our library, of course, is really just a storeroom, but each time our team delivers a new biography, I like to do it with some ceremony. Again, my apologies for using that regrettable pronoun “I.” I try not to bring it to work with me. Shelves line the walls, floor to ceiling, and fill the room in freestanding rows. In a society where it is the collective that matters, we’re the only people who make the individuals count. No matter what happens to our subjects after we interrogate them, we still have them here. We’ve saved them all. The irony of course is that the average citizen, the average interrogator walking the street, for instance, never gets his story told. Nobody asks him his favorite Sun Moon movie, nobody wants to know does he prefer millet cakes or millet porridge. No, in a cruel twist, it’s only enemies of the state that get this kind of star treatment.

With a little fanfare, we placed the professor’s biography on the shelf, right next to the girl dancer from last week. She had us all weeping as she described how her little brother lost his eyes, and when the moment came to apply the autopilot to her, the pain made her limbs rise and sweep the air in rhythmic, graceful gestures, as if she were telling her story one last time through movement. You can see that “interrogation” isn’t even the right word for what we do—it’s a clumsy holdover from the Pubyok era. When the last Pubyok finally retires, we will lobby to have our name changed to Division of Citizen Biographies.

Our interns, Q-Kee and Jujack, returned out of breath.

“A team of Pubyok are there,” Q-Kee said.

“They got to Commander Ga first,” Jujack added.

We raced upstairs. When we got to the holding room, Sarge and some of his guys were just leaving. Sarge was the leader of the Pubyok, and there was no love lost between us. His forehead was prominent, and even in his seventies, he had the body of an ape. Sarge was what we called him. I never knew his real name.

He stood in the doorway, rubbing one hand in the other.

“Impersonating a national hero,” Sarge said, shaking his head. “What’s our nation coming to? Is there any honor left at all?”

There were some marks on Sarge’s face, and as he spoke blood trickled from his nose.

Q-Kee touched her own nose. “Looks like Commander Ga got the best of you guys.”

That girl Q-Kee—what cheek!

“It’s not Commander Ga,” Sarge said. “But, yeah, he had a nifty little trick he pulled on us. We’re sending him down to the sump tonight. We’ll show him some tricks of our own.”

“But what about his biography?” we asked.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Sarge asked. “It’s not Commander Ga. The guy’s an imposter.”

“Then you won’t mind if our team tries its hand. We’re only after the truth.”

“The truth isn’t in your silly books,” Sarge said. “It’s something you can see in a man’s eyes. You can feel it here, in your heart.”

Personally, I felt bad for Sarge. He was an old man, of large stature. To have that kind of size meant you’d eaten meat as a child, something that would most likely come from collaborating with the Japanese. Whether he’d cozied up to the Japs or not, everyone he’d met, over his whole life, probably suspected he had.

“But yeah, the guy’s all yours,” Sarge said. “After all, what are we without honor?” he added, but he said the word “we” in a way that didn’t include us. He started to walk away, but then turned back. “Don’t let him near the light switch,” he warned.

Inside, we found Commander Ga in a chair. The Pubyok had done a number on him, and he certainly didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d led assassination missions into the South to silence loudmouth defectors. He looked us over, trying to decide whether we meant to beat him as well, though he didn’t seem inclined to offer any defense if we did.

His busted lips looked pitiful, and his reddened ears were filling with fluid from being slapped with the soles of dress shoes. We could see old frostbite marks on his fingers, and his shirt had been torn off, revealing a tattoo on his chest of the actress Sun Moon. We shook our heads. Poor Sun Moon. There was also a large scar on his arm, though the rumors that Commander Ga had wrestled a bear were just that, rumors. In his rucksack, we found only a pair of black cowboy boots, a single can of peaches, and a bright red cell phone, battery dead.

“We’re here for your story,” we told him.

His face was still ringing from Pubyok fists.

“I hope you like happy endings,” he said.

We helped him to an interrogation bay and into his own Q & A chair. We gave him aspirin and a cup of water, and soon he was asleep.

We scribbled off a quick note that said, “Is not Commander Ga.” This we placed in a vacuum tube and, with a whoosh, sent it deep into the bunker complex below us, where all the decisions were made. How deep the bunker went and who exactly was down there, we didn’t know. The deeper the better was how I felt. I mean we felt.

Before we’d even turned to go, the vacuum tube had raced back and dropped into our hopper. When we opened it, the note inside read simply, “Is Commander Ga.”

It was only at the very end of the day, when we were about to hang up our smocks, that we returned to him. The swelling had started on the face of Commander Ga, or whoever he was, though there was something peaceful about his sleep. We noticed that his hands rested on his stomach, and they seemed to be typing, as if he were transcribing the dream he was having. We stared at his fingers awhile but could make no sense of what he might be writing.

“We’re not the ones who hurt you,” we said when we woke him. “That was the work of another party. Answer a simple question for us, and we’ll get you a room, a comfortable bed.”

Commander Ga nodded. There were so many questions we were dying to ask him.

But then our intern Q-Kee suddenly spoke up. “What did you do with the actress’s body?” she blurted out. “Where did you hide it?”

We took Q-Kee by the shoulder and led her out of the interrogation bay. She was the first female intern in the history of Division 42, and boy, was she a firebrand. The Pubyok were beside themselves that a woman was in the building, but to have a modern, forward-thinking interrogation division, a female interrogator was going to be essential.

“Start slow,” we told Q-Kee. “We’re building a relationship here. We don’t want to put him on the defensive. If we earn his trust, he’ll practically write his story for us.”

“Who cares about the biography?” she asked. “Once we find out the location of the dead actress and her kids, they’ll shoot him in the street. End of story.”

“Character is destiny,” we told her, reminding her of the famous quote from Kim Il Sung. “That means that once we discover the inside of a subject, what makes him tick, we not only know everything he’s done but everything he will do.”

Back in the interrogation bay, Q-Kee reluctantly asked a more appropriate question.

“How did you first meet the actress Sun Moon?” she asked.

Commander Ga closed his eyes. “So cold,” he said. “She was on the side of the infirmary. The infirmary was white. The snow fell heavily, it blocked my view of her. The battleship burned. They used the infirmary because it was white. Inside, people moaned. The water was on fire.”

“He’s worthless,” Q-Kee muttered.

She was right. It had been a long day. Up top, on ground level, the rust-colored light of afternoon would be stretching long now through downtown Pyongyang. It was time to call it quits and get home before the power went out.

“Wait,” Jujack said. “Just give us something, Commander Ga.”