Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“How?” Ga asked. “How will you bring them here?”

Now the Dear Leader smiled. “That’s the best part,” he said.

He led Ga to the end of the curving hall, where there was a staircase. They took metal stairs down several floors, with the Dear Leader trying to hide a limp. Soon, seeps of water ran down the walls, and the metal rail became rusted and loose. When Commander Ga leaned over the rail to see how far down the steps went, there was nothing but darkness and echoes. The Dear Leader at last stopped on a landing and opened a door to a new hall, this one much different. Here, each door they passed had a small, reinforced window and a swing-arm lock. Commander Ga knew a prison when he saw one.

“Seems pretty lonely down here,” he said.

“Don’t feel that way,” the Dear Leader said without looking back. “You’ve got me.”

“What about you?” Ga asked. “You come down here alone?”

The Dear Leader stopped before a door and pulled out a solitary key. He looked at Commander Ga and smiled. “I’m never alone,” he said, and opened the door.

Inside the room was a tall, skinny woman, her face hidden by shaggy dark hair. Before her were spread many books, and she was writing by the light of a lamp whose cord disappeared into a hole in the cement ceiling. Silent, she gazed up at them.

“Who is she?” Commander Ga asked.

“Ask her yourself. She speaks English,” the Dear Leader said, then turned to the woman. “You bad girl,” he told her. He had a grand smile on his face. “Bad , bad , bad girl.”

Ga approached and crouched down, so they were at eye level. “Who are you?” he asked in English.

She eyed the gun on his hip and shook her head, as if revealing anything might bring harm upon her.

Here, Ga saw that the books before the woman were English versions of the eleven-volume Selected Works of Kim Jong Il , which she was transcribing into notebooks, stacks of them, word for word. He cocked his head and saw she was transcribing a tenet from volume five, called On the Art of the Cinema .

“ ‘The Actress cannot play a role,’ ” Ga read. “ ‘She must , in an act of martyrdom , sacrifice herself to become the character.’ ”

The Dear Leader smiled in approval at the sound of his own words. “She’s quite the pupil,” he said.

The Dear Leader motioned for her to take a break. She set her pencil down and began rubbing her hands. This caught Commander Ga’s attention. He leaned in close.

“Will you show me your hands?” he asked.

He extended his own hands, palms up, to demonstrate.

Slowly, she revealed them. Her hands were thick with gray, pitted calluses, rows of them, right to the pads of her fingertips. Commander Ga closed his eyes and nodded in recognition at the thousands of hours at the oars that had made her hands this way.

He turned to the Dear Leader. “How?” he asked. “Where did you find her?”

“A fishing boat picked her up,” the Dear Leader said. “It was just her alone in her rowboat, no friend in sight. She’d done a bad thing to her friend, a very bad thing. The captain rescued her and set the boat ablaze.” With some delight, the Dear Leader pointed a finger of naughtiness at the girl. “Bad girl , bad,” he said. “But we forgive her. Yes, what’s past is past. Such things happen, it can’t be helped. Do you think the Americans will visit now? Do you think the Senator will soon regret making my ambassadors eat without cutlery, outside, among dogs?”

“We’ll have to get many specific items,” Commander Ga said. “If our American welcome party is to succeed, I’ll need the help of Comrade Buc.”

The Dear Leader nodded.

Commander Ga returned to the woman. “I hear you’ve talked to whale sharks,” he said to her. “And navigated by the glow of jellyfish.”

“It didn’t happen the way they say it did,” she said. “She was like my sister , and now I’m alone , it’s just me.”

“What’s she saying?” the Dear Leader asked.

“She says she’s alone.”

“Nonsense,” the Dear Leader said. “I’m down here all the time. I offer her comfort.”

“They tried to board our boat,” she said. “Linda , my friend , she fired flares at them; it’s all we had to defend ourselves with. But they kept coming , they shot her right there , right in front of me. Tell me , how long have I been down here?”

Commander Ga removed the camera from his pocket. “May I?” he asked the Dear Leader.

“Oh, Commander Ga,” the Dear Leader said, shaking his head. “You and your cameras. At least this time it’s a female you’re taking a picture of.”

“Would you like to meet a senator?” Ga asked her.

Guardedly, she nodded.

“You keep your eyes open in this place,” he said. “No more rowing with your eyes closed. Do that and I’ll bring you a senator.”

The girl flinched as Commander Ga reached to pull the hair from her face, and she was wild-eyed with fear as the camera’s tiny motor whirred her into focus. And then came the flash.

WHEN OUR interns first arrived at Division 42, they were issued the standard items—field smocks, which buttoned in the front, interrogation smocks, which buttoned in the back, clipboards, and, finally, mandatory eyeglasses, which lend us an air of authority, thus further intellectually intimidating our subjects into compliance. All the members of the Pubyok team had been issued gear bags that contained items designed to brutalize and punish—abrasion gloves, rubber mallets, stomach tubes, and so on—and it’s true that our interns looked disappointed when we broke the news that our team had no need for such things. But tonight, we handed Jujack a pair of bolt cutters, and you could see his face light with a sense of mission. He hefted the cutters before his eyes to find their balance point. And Q-Kee took possession of a cattle prod by rapid-firing the trigger so fast that our room strobed blue. I didn’t exactly travel in elite yangban circles, so I had no way of knowing who this Comrade Buc fellow would turn out to be, but I was sure he’d be an important chapter in our biography of Commander Ga.

Then we all donned headlamps and surgical masks and took turns buttoning up the backs of each other’s smocks before descending the ladders that led into the heart of the torture wing. As we were unscrewing the hatch that led down into the sump, Jujack asked us, “Is it true that old interrogators get sent to prison?”

Our hands stopped turning. “The Pubyok are right about one thing,” we told him. “Don’t ever let a subject get inside your head.”

Once we were through the hatch, we sealed it behind us. Then we descended many metal rungs, protruding from the cement wall. Down here were four great pumps that pulled water from bunkers even deeper below. They activated a couple of times an hour, running for only a few minutes, but the heat and noise they generated was tremendous. This is where the Pubyok stored recalcitrant subjects, ones that were being softened by time and a humidity that steamed our lenses. A bar that ran the length of the room was bolted to the floor, and to this thirty-odd subjects were chained. The floor was sloped, for drainage, so that the poor fools on the lower side of the room slept in a skein of standing water.

Few people roused as we crossed the room through a light drizzle of warm water that dripped from a concrete ceiling that was slick with green. We held our masks tight. Last year diphtheria stole into the sump, taking all subjects and pocketing a few interrogators as well.