Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

At Division 42, a strip of light was shining underneath the door to the Pubyok lounge. I slipped quietly past—with those guys, you never knew if they were staying late or arriving early.

I found Commander Ga sleeping peacefully, but his can of peaches was gone.

I shook him awake. “Where are the peaches?” I asked him.

He rubbed his face, ran a hand through his hair. “Is it day or night?” he asked.

“Night.”

He nodded. “Feels like night.”

“Peaches,” I said. “Is that what you fed to the actress and her kids? Is that how you killed them?”

Ga turned to his table. It was empty. “Where are my peaches?” he asked me. “Those are special peaches. You’ve got to get them back before something terrible happens.”

Just then, I saw Q-Kee walk past in the hall. It was three thirty in the morning! The shock-work whistles wouldn’t blow for another two hours. I called to her, but she kept going.

I turned to Ga. “You want to tell me what a Bergman is?”

“A Bergman?” he asked. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“How about an Ingrid?”

“There’s no such word,” he said.

I stared at him a moment. “Did you love her?”

“I still love her.”

“But how?” I asked him. “How did you get her to love you back?”

“Intimacy.”

“ Intimacy? What is that?”

“It’s when two people share everything, when there are no secrets between them.”

I had to laugh. “No secrets?” I asked him. “It’s not possible. We spend weeks extracting entire biographies from subjects, and always when we hook them up to the autopilot, they blurt out some crucial detail we’d missed. So getting every secret out of someone, sorry, it’s just not possible.”

“No,” Ga said. “She gives you her secrets. And you give her yours.”

I saw Q-Kee walk past again, this time she was wearing a headlamp. I left Ga to catch up with her—she had a hallway-length lead on me. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” I called to her.

Echoing through the halls, I heard her answer, “I’m dedicated.”

I caught up with her in the stairwell, but she wasn’t slowing. In her hands, she had a device from the shop, a hand pump connected to a section of rubber tubing. It’s used to irrigate and drain a subject’s stomach—organ swelling from force-induced fluids being the third most painful of all coercion tactics.

“Where are you going with that?” I asked.

Flight after flight, we spiraled deeper into the building.

“I don’t have time,” she said.

I grabbed her hard by the elbow and spun her. She didn’t look used to that treatment.

“I made a mistake,” she said. “But really, we have to hurry.”

Down two more flights, we came to the sump and the hatch was open.

“No,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”

She disappeared down the ladder, and when I followed, I could see Comrade Buc writhing on the floor, a spilled can of peaches beside him. Q-Kee was fighting his convulsions to get the tube down his throat. Black saliva streamed from his mouth, his eyes were drooping, sure signs of botulism poisoning.

“Forget it,” I said. “The toxin’s already in his nervous system.”

She grunted in frustration. “I know, I screwed up,” she said.

“Go on.”

“I shouldn’t have, I know,” she said. “It’s just that, he knows everything.”

“Knew.”

“Yes, knew.” She looked like she wanted to kick Buc’s shuddering body. “I thought if I could take a crack at him, then we’d figure this whole thing out. I came down here and asked him what he wanted, and he told me peaches. He said it was the last thing he wanted on earth.” Then she did kick him, but it seemed to bring no satisfaction. “He said if I brought him the peaches last night, he’d tell me everything in the morning.”

“How did he know night from day?”

She shook her head. “Another screwup. I told him.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “Every intern makes that mistake.”

“But in the middle of the night,” she said, “I got this gut feeling something was wrong, so I came down to find him like this.”

“We don’t work on gut feelings,” I said. “Pubyok do.”

“Well, what did we get out of Buc? Basically nothing. What have we got from Commander Ga? A fucking fairy tale and how to jerk off an ox.”

“Q-Kee,” I said. I put my hands on my hips and took a deep breath.

“Don’t be mad at me,” she said. “You’re the one who asked Comrade Buc about canned peaches. You’re the one who told him Commander Ga was in the building. Buc just put two and two together.”

She looked ready to storm off. “There’s one more thing,” she said. “Remember how Commander Ga asked whether those peaches were his or Comrade Buc’s? When I handed Comrade Buc the can of peaches, he asked me the same question.”

“What did you tell him?”

“What did I tell him? Nothing,” she said. “I’m the interrogator, remember?”

“Wrong,” I told her. “You’re the intern.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Interrogators are people who get results.”

Behind the cells where new subjects are first processed is the central property locker. It’s on the main floor, and before leaving I went there to snoop around. Anything of real value was looted by the MPSS agents long before bringing the subjects in. Up and down the rows I studied the meager possessions that people were carrying before their final visit here. Lots of sandals. Enemies of the state tended to wear a size seven, was my initial observation. Here were the acorns from people’s pockets, the twigs they used to clean their teeth, rucksacks filled with rags and eating utensils. And next to a piece of tape bearing Comrade Buc’s name, I found a can of peaches with a red-and-green label, grown in Manpo, canned in Fruit Factory 49.

I took the can of peaches and headed home.

The subway had started running, and jammed in one of the cars, I looked no different than the legions of gray-clad factory workers as we involuntarily leaned against one another in the turns. I kept seeing Buc’s family, beautiful in their white dresses. I kept hoping my mother, cooking breakfast blind, didn’t burn the apartment down. Somehow she always managed not to. And even one hundred meters underground we all heard the shock-work whistle’s five morning blasts.

COMMANDER GA’S eyes opened to see the boy and the girl at the foot of the bed, staring at him. They were really just the shine of first light in their hair, a thin blue across cheekbones. He blinked, and though it seemed like a second, he must have slept because when he opened his eyes again, the boy and the girl were gone.

In the kitchen he found the chair balanced against the counter, and here they were, up high, staring into the open door of the top cabinet.

He lit the burner under a carbon steel skillet, then quartered an onion and spooned in some oil.

“How many guns are in there?” he asked them.

The boy and the girl shared a look. The girl held up three fingers.

“Has anyone shown you how to handle a pistol?”

They shook their heads no.

“Then you know not to touch them, right?”

They nodded.

The smell of cooking brought barking from the dog on the balcony.

“Come, you two,” he said. “We need to find where your father keeps your mother’s cigarettes before she wakes mad as a dog in the zoo.”

With Brando, Commander Ga scoured the house, toe-tapping the baseboards and inspecting the undersides of furniture. Brando sniffed and barked at everything he touched, while the children hung back, wary but curious. Ga didn’t know what he was looking for. He moved slowly from room to room, noticing a patched-over flue hole where an old heating stove had been. He observed a patch of swollen plaster, perhaps from a roof leak. Near the front door, he saw marks in the hardwood floor. He ran his toes over the scratches, then looked up.