Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

The subject seemed to like being called Commander Ga.

Jujack went on, “Just tell us what you were dreaming about. Then we’ll take you to a room.”

“I was driving a car,” Commander Ga said. “An American car.”

“Yes,” Jujack said. “Keep going. Have you really driven an American car?”

Jujack was one fine intern—he was the first minister’s boy who’d ever been worth a damn.

“I have,” Commander Ga said.

“Why not start there, why not tell us about driving an American car?”

Slowly, he began to speak. “It’s nighttime,” he said. “My hand shifts through the gears. The streetlights are off, electric buses are crammed with third-shift factory workers, silently racing down Chollima Street and Reunification Boulevard. Sun Moon is in the car with me. I don’t know Pyongyang. Left , she says. Right . We are driving to her house, across the river, on the heights of Mount Taesong. In the dream, I believe that this night will be different, that when we arrive home she will finally let me touch her. She is wearing a platinum choson-ot , shimmery as crushed diamonds. On the streets, people in black pajamas dart into our path, people carrying bundles and groceries and extra work to take home, but I do not slow. I am Commander Ga in the dream. My whole life, I’ve been steered by others, I’ve been the one trying to escape from their paths. But Commander Ga, he is a man who steps on the gas.”

“In the dream, have you just become Commander Ga?” we asked him.

But he kept going, as if he didn’t hear us. “We cut through Mansu Park, mist from the river. In the woods, families are stealing chestnuts from the trees—the children running through the branches, kicking the nuts down to parents who crack them open between rocks. Once you spotted a yellow or blue bucket, they all came into focus—once your eyes adjusted they were everywhere, families risking prison to steal nuts from public parks. Are they playing some kind of game? Sun Moon asked me. They are so amusing , up in the trees in their white bedclothes. Or maybe it’s athletics they’re performing. You know , gymnastics. It’s such a treat , this kind of surprise. What a fine movie it would make—a family of circus performers who practice in the trees of a public park at night. They must practice in secret because a rival circus family is always stealing their tricks. Can’t you just picture this movie , she asked me, up on the screen? The moment was so perfect. I would’ve driven off the bridge and killed us both to make that moment last forever, such was my love for Sun Moon, a woman who was so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

The five of us stood there in awe of the story. Commander Ga had certainly earned his sedative. I gave Q-Kee a look that said, Now do you understand the subtle art of interrogation?

You shouldn’t be in this business if you don’t find your subjects endlessly interesting. If all you want to do is rough them up. We determined that Ga was the type to tend his own wounds, so we locked him in a room with some disinfectant and a bandage. Then we traded our smocks for vinalon coats and discussed his case as we reclined on the steep escalators that led down into the Pyongyang Metro. Notice how our subject’s identity shift is near total—the imposter even dreams he is Commander Ga. Notice, too, how he began his story as a love story might open, with beauty and an insight that combined pity with the need to protect. He does not start his story by admitting where he really got this American car. He does not mention that they are driving home from a party, hosted by Kim Jong Il, where Ga was assaulted for the amusement of the guests. It slips his mind that he has somehow disposed of the husband of this woman he “loves.”

Yes, we know a few of the facts of Ga’s story, the outside of it, if you will. The rumors had been swirling around the capital for weeks. It was the inside we’d have to discover. I could already tell this would be the biggest, most important biography we’d ever write. I could already picture the cover of Commander Ga’s biography. I could imagine the subject’s true name, whatever that would turn out to be, embossed on the spine. Mentally, I had already finished that book. I was already placing that book on a shelf and turning out the lights and then closing the door to a room where the dust snowed through the darkness at a rate of three millimeters per decade.

The library is a sacred place to us. No visitors are allowed, and once a book is closed, it never gets opened. Oh, sure, sometimes the boys from Propaganda will nose around for a feel-good story to play to the citizens over the loudspeakers, but we’re story takers, not storytellers. We’re a far cry from the old veterans who spin weepers to passersby in front of the Respect for Elders Retirement Home on Moranbong Street.

The Kwangbok station, with its beautiful mural of Lake Samji, is my stop. The city is filled with wood smoke when I emerge from the subway into my Pottongang neighborhood. An old woman is grilling green-onion tails on the sidewalk, and I catch the traffic girl switching her blue sunglasses for an amber-tinted nighttime pair. On the streets, I barter the professor’s gold pen for cucumbers, a kilo of U.N. rice, and some sesame paste. Apartment lights come to life above us as we bargain, and you can see that no one lives above the ninth floor of their apartment buildings. The elevators never work, and if they do, the power’s bound to go out when you’re between floors and trap you in a shaft. My building’s called the Glory of Mount Paektu, and I’m the sole occupant of the twenty-second floor, a height that makes sure my elderly parents never go out unattended. It doesn’t take as long as you’d think to climb the stairs—a person can get used to anything.

Inside, I’m assaulted by the evening propaganda broadcasts coming over the apartment’s hardwired loudspeaker. There’s one in every apartment and factory floor in Pyongyang, everywhere but where I work, as it was deemed the loudspeakers would give our subjects too much orienting information, like date and time, too much normalcy. When subjects come to us, they need to learn that the world of before no longer exists.

I cook my parents dinner. When they taste the food, they praise Kim Jong Il for its flavor, and when I ask after their day, they say it certainly wasn’t as hard as the day of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, who carries the fate of a people on his back. Their eyesight failed at the same time, and they have become paranoid that there might be someone around they can’t perceive, ready to report them for anything they say. They listen to the loudspeaker all day, hail me as citizen! when I get home, and are careful to never reveal a personal feeling, lest it get them denounced by a stranger they can’t quite lay their eyes on. That’s why our biographies are important—instead of keeping things from your government by living a life of secrecy, they’re a model of how to share everything. I like to think I’m part of a different tomorrow in that regard.

I finish my bowl on the balcony. I look down upon the rooftops of smaller buildings, which have all been covered with grass as part of the Grass into Meat Campaign. All the goats on the roof across the street are bleating because dusk is when the eagle owls come down from the mountains to hunt. Yes, I thought, Ga’s would be quite a story to tell: an unknown man impersonates a famous one. He is now in possession of Sun Moon. He is now close to the Dear Leader. And when an American delegation comes to Pyongyang, this unknown man uses the distraction to slay the beautiful woman, at his own peril. He doesn’t even try to get away with it. Now that’s a biography.