Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

I’ve attempted to write my own, just as a means of better understanding the subjects I ask to do so. The result is a catalog more banal than anything that comes from the guests of Division 42. My biography was filled with a thousand insignificances—the way the city fountains only turn on the couple of times a year when the capital has a foreign visitor, or how, despite the fact that cell phones are illegal and I’ve never seen a single person using one, the city’s main cellular tower is in my neighborhood, just across the Pottong Bridge, a grand tower painted green and trimmed in fake branches. Or the time I came home to find an entire platoon of KPA soldiers sitting on the sidewalk outside Glory of Mount Paektu, sharpening their bayonets on the cement curb. Was it a message to me, to someone? A coincidence?

As an experiment, the biography was a failure—where was the me in it, where was I?—and of course it was hard to get past the feeling that if I finished it, something bad would happen to me. The real truth was that I couldn’t stand the pronoun “I.” Even at home, in the privacy of my own notepad, I have difficulty writing that word.

As I sipped the cucumber juice at the bottom of my rice bowl, I watched the last light play like a flickering fire on the walls of a housing block across the river. We write our subject biographies in the third person, to maintain our objectivity. It might be easier if I wrote my own biography that way, as though the story wasn’t about me but about an intrepid interrogator. But then I’d have to use my name, which is against the rules. And what’s the point of telling a personal story if you’re only referred to as “The Interrogator”? Who wants to read a book called The Biographer ? No, you want to read a book with someone’s name on it. You want to read a book called The Man Who Killed Sun Moon .

In the distance, the light reflecting off the water flashed and danced against the housing block, and I had a sudden idea.

“I forgot something at work,” I told my parents and then locked them in.

I took the subway across town, back to Division 42, but it was too late—the power went out when we were deep in the tunnel. By the light of matchbooks, we all poured out of the electric train cars and filed along the dark tracks to the Rakwan station, where the escalator was now a ramp of stairs, to climb the hundred meters to the surface. It was full dark when I made it to the street, and the sensation of emerging from one darkness to another was one I didn’t like—it felt like I was in Commander Ga’s dream, with flashes of black and buses cruising like sharks in the dark. I almost let myself imagine there was an American car out there, moving just beyond my perception, following me.

When I woke Commander Ga, his fingers were transcribing his dream again, but this time in a slow and slurred manner. We North Koreans do know how to make a world-class sedative.

“When you said you met Sun Moon,” I said, “you mentioned she was on the side of a building, right?”

Commander Ga only nodded.

“They were projecting a movie on the wall of a building, yes? So you first met her through a film.”

“A film,” Commander Ga said.

“And they picked the infirmary because its walls were white, which means you were outside when you saw the movie. And the snow was heavy because you were high in the mountains.”

Commander Ga closed his eyes.

“And the burning ships, this was her movie Tyrants Asunder ?”

Commander Ga was fading, but I wasn’t going to stop.

“And the people moaning in the infirmary, they were moaning because this was a prison, wasn’t it?” I asked him. “You were a prisoner, weren’t you?”

I didn’t need an answer. And of course, what better place to meet the real Commander Ga, the Minister of Prison Mines, than in a prison mine? So he’d met them both there, husband and wife.

I pulled Commander Ga’s sheets high enough to cover his tattoo. I was already starting to think of him as Commander Ga. When we finally discovered his real identity, it was going to be a shame, for Q-Kee was right—they’d shoot him in the street. You don’t kill a minister and then escape from prison and then kill the minister’s family and still get to become a peasant in a rural farm collective. I studied the man before me. “What did the real Commander Ga do to you?” I asked him. His hands raised above the sheets and he began typing on his stomach. “What could the Minister have done that was so bad you killed him and then went after his wife and kids?”

As he typed, I stared at his eyes, and his pupils weren’t moving behind the lids. He wasn’t transcribing what he saw in his dream. Perhaps it was what he heard that he’d been trained to record. “Good night, Commander Ga,” I said, and watched as his hands typed four words, and then paused, waiting for more.

I took a sedative myself and then left Commander Ga to sleep through the night. Ideally, the sedative wouldn’t take effect until after I’d made it across town. If things worked out just right, it would kick in after the twenty-second flight of stairs.

COMMANDER GA tried to forget about the interrogator, though Ga could smell the cucumber on his breath long after the man had swallowed his pill and walked out the door. Speaking of Sun Moon had put fresh images of her in Ga’s mind, and that’s what Ga cared about. He could practically see the movie they’d been talking about. A True Daughter of the Country . That was the name of the movie, not Tyrants Asunder . Sun Moon had played a woman from the southern island of Cheju who leaves her family and journeys north to battle the imperialists at Inchon. Cheju, he learned, was famous for its women abalone divers, and the movie opens with three sisters on a raft. Opaque waves capped with pumice-colored foam lift and drop the women. A wave the color of charcoal rolls into the frame, blotting the women from view until it passes, while brutal clouds scrape the volcanic shore. The oldest sister is Sun Moon. She splashes water on her limbs, to prepare herself for the cold, and adjusts her mask as her sisters speak of village gossip. Then Sun Moon hefts a rock, breathes deeply, and rolls backward off the raft into water so dark it should be night. The sisters switch their talk to the war and their sick mother and their fears that Sun Moon will abandon them. They lie back on the raft in a moment filmed from the mast above, and the sisters speak of village life again, of their neighbors’ crushes and spats, but they have gone somber and it is clear that what they are not talking about is the war and how, if they do not go to it, it will come to them.

He’d watched this movie with the others, projected onto the side of the prison infirmary, the only building that was painted white. It was Kim Jong Il’s birthday, February 16, their one day off work a year. The inmates sat on upended pieces of firewood that they’d beaten free of ice, and this was his first look at her, a woman luminous with beauty who plunges into darkness and simply won’t seem to return. The sisters speak on and on, the waves build and break, the patients in the infirmary weakly moan as their blood-collection bags fill, and still Sun Moon will not surface. He wrings his hands at the loss of her, all the prisoners do, and even though she eventually surfaces, they all know that for the rest of the movie she will have that power over them.

It was that night, he now remembered, that Mongnan saved his life for the second time. It was very cold, the coldest he’d ever been, for work was what kept them warm all day, and watching a movie in the snow had allowed his body temperature to dangerously fall.