Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“My question,” he said.

We did owe him the answer to a question.

At the Academy, they had an old adage about electricity therapy: “Voltage closes the attic but opens the cellar,” meaning that it tends to disrupt a subject’s working memory but leaves deep impressions intact and surprisingly easy to access. So maybe, if Ga was lucid enough, we had an opportunity. We’d take what we could get.

“Tell us your oldest memory,” we said, “and then you get your question.”

Ga began as the lobotomized begin, without calculation or consideration, speaking in a voice that was lifeless and rote:

“I was a boy,” he said. “And I went for a long walk and got lost. My parents were dreamers and didn’t notice I was gone. They came to look for me but it was too late—I had wandered too far. A cold wind rose and said, ‘Come, little boy, sleep in my floating white sheets,’ and I thought, Now I will freeze to death . I ran to escape the wind, and a mine shaft said, ‘Come, shelter yourself in my depths,’ and I thought, Now I will fall down to death . I ran into the fields where the filth is thrown and the sick are left. There, a ghost said, ‘Let me inside, and I’ll warm you from within,’ and I thought, Now I will die of fever . Then a bear came and spoke to me, but I did not know his language. I ran into the woods and the bear followed me, and I thought, Now I will be eaten to death . The bear took me in his strong arm and held me close to his face. He used his great claws to comb my hair. He dipped his paw in honey and brought his claws to my lips. Then the bear said, ‘You will learn to speak bear now, and you will become as the bear and you will be safe.’ ”

Everybody recognized the story, one that’s taught to all the orphans, with the bear representing the eternal love of Kim Jong Il. So Commander Ga was an orphan. We shook our heads at the revelation. And it gave us chills the way he told the story, as if it actually was about him and not a character he had learned about, as if he personally had nearly died of cold, hunger, fever, and mine mishaps, as if he himself had licked honey from the Dear Leader’s claws. But such is the universal power of storytelling.

“My question?” Ga asked.

“Of course,” we told him. “Ask away.”

Commander Ga pointed at the can of peaches on his bedside table. “Are those my peaches?” he asked. “Or your peaches or Comrade Buc’s?”

Suddenly, we were quiet. We leaned in close.

“Who’s Comrade Buc?” we asked.

“Comrade Buc,” Ga said, looking into each of our faces, as if we were Comrade Buc. “Forgive me for what I did to you, I’m sorry about your scar.”

Ga’s eyes lost focus, then his head went back to the pillow. He felt cold, but when we checked his temperature again, it was normal—electricity can really throw off a body’s thermal regulation. When we were sure it was just exhaustion, Jujack motioned us to the corner of the room, where he spoke in a hushed tone.

“I know that name, Comrade Buc,” Jujack said. “I just saw it on an ankle bracelet, down in the sump.”

That’s when we lit a cigarette, placed it in Commander Ga’s lips, and then began gearing up for another trip beneath the torture complex.

WHEN THE interrogators had left, Commander Ga lay in the dark, smoking. In pain school, they’d taught him to find his reserve, a private place he could go in unbearable moments. A pain reserve was like a real reserve—you put a fence around it, attended to its welfare, kept it pristine, and dealt with all trespassers. Nobody could ever know what your pain reserve was, even if you’d chosen the most obvious, rudimentary element of your life, because if you lost your pain reserve, you’d lost everything.

In prison, when rocks smashed his hands or a baton came down on the back of his neck, he’d attempt to transport himself to the deck of the Junma and its gentle rolling motion. When the cold made his fingers staticky with pain, he tried to get inside the opera diva’s song, to enter her voice itself. He tried to veil himself in the yellow of the Second Mate’s wife’s dress or pull the cloak of an American quilt over his head, but none of them really worked. It was only when he’d seen Sun Moon’s movie that he finally had a reserve—she saved him from everything. When his pickax struck frozen rock, in that spark, he felt her aliveness. When a wall of ore dust would sweep through a passage and double him over with cough, she gave him breath. When once he stepped in an electrified puddle, Sun Moon appeared and restarted his heart.

So it was that today, when the old Pubyok of Division 42 fitted him with the halo, he turned to her. Even before they’d fastened the thumbscrews to his scalp, he’d taken leave of them and was returning to the first day he’d physically stood in the presence of Sun Moon. He didn’t believe that he might actually meet her until he’d made it out of the gates of Prison 33, until the Warden called for the guards to open the gate, and he stepped through its razor-wire threshold and then heard the gate slide shut behind him. He was wearing Commander Ga’s uniform and was holding the box of photographs Mongnan had given him. In his pocket was the camera he’d watched over and a long-guarded DVD of Casablanca . Armed with these things, he walked through the mud to the car that would take him to her.

As he stepped into the Mercedes, the driver turned to him, shock and confusion on his face.

Commander Ga could see a thermos on the dashboard. A year without tea.

“I could use a cup of tea,” he said.

The driver didn’t move. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“Are you a homosexual?” was Commander Ga’s answer.

The driver stared at him in disbelief, then shook his head.

“Are you sure? Have you been tested?”

“Yes,” the driver said, confused. Then he said, “No.”

“Get out,” Commander Ga said. “I’m Commander Ga now. That other man is gone. If you think you belong with him, I can take you to him, what’s left of him, down in the mine. Because you’re either his driver or my driver. If you’re my driver, you’ll pour me a cup of tea, get me to a civilized place where I can bathe. Then you’ll take me home.”

“Home?”

“Home to my wife, the actress Sun Moon.”

And then Ga was being driven to Sun Moon, the only person who could take away the pain he’d suffered in getting to her. A crow towed their Mercedes through the mountain roads, and in the backseat Ga looked through the box Mongnan had given him. It contained thousands of pictures. Mongnan had clipped together inmates’ entrance and exit photos. Back to back, alive and dead, thousands of people. He flipped through the box so that all the exit images faced him—bodies crushed and torn and folded in unnatural angles. He recognized victims of cave-ins and beatings. In some pictures, he couldn’t tell exactly what he was looking at. Mostly, the dead looked as if they’d gone to sleep, and children, because it was the cold that got them, were curled up in hard little discs, like lozenges. Mongnan was meticulous, and the catalog was complete. This box, he suddenly understood, was the closest thing his nation had to the phone book he’d seen in Texas.

He spun the box around, and now facing him were all the entrance photos, in which people were fearful and uncertain and hadn’t quite let themselves imagine the nightmare they were in for, and these photos were even harder to look at. When at last he located his own entrance photo, he turned it slowly, seriously expecting to see himself dead. But it wasn’t so. He took a moment to marvel at that. He studied the light in the trees as they flashed by. He watched the motion of the crow ahead, its tow chain tinkling with slackness before snapping taut. He remembered the eggshells spinning whimsically in the crow that had brought him. In his photo, you couldn’t see the dying people on cots around him. You couldn’t see his hands dripping with bloody ice water. But the eyes—it’s unmistakable how they are wide yet refusing to see what is before them. Such a boy he seems, as if he’s still back in an orphanage, believing that all is well and that the fate which befalls all the orphan boys won’t befall him. The chalk name on the slate he held seemed so foreign. Here was the only photo of that person, the person he used to be. He tore it slowly into strips before letting them flutter out the window.