Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Opening the wardrobe, Q-Kee ran a finger across Sun Moon’s choson-ots until it came to rest at an empty dowel. “This is the one she took,” Q-Kee said. “It must have been spectacular, if these are the ones she left behind. So Sun Moon wasn’t planning on being gone long, yet she wanted to look her best.” She gazed at the lustrous fabrics before her. “I know every dress she wore in every movie,” she said. “If I stood here long enough, I’d figure out the missing dress.”

“But harvesting the garden,” I said. “That suggests they were planning on being gone a long time.”

“Or maybe it was a last meal, in her best dress.”

I said, “But that only makes sense if—”

“—if Sun Moon knew what was going to happen to her,” Q-Kee added.

“But if Sun Moon knew Ga meant to kill her, why dress up, why go along?”

Q-Kee considered the question as her touch lingered on all those beautiful dresses.

“Perhaps we should impound them as evidence,” I told her, “so that you could more closely inspect them at your leisure.”

“They are beautiful,” she said. “Like my mother’s dresses. But I clothe myself. Plus, dressing like a tour guide at the International Friendship Museum, that isn’t my style.”

Leonardo and Jujack returned from Comrade Buc’s.

“Nothing much to report,” Leonardo said.

“We found a hidden compartment in the kitchen wall,” Jujack added. “But inside were only these.”

He held up five miniature Bibles.

The light changed as the sun flashed off the steel of the distant May Day Stadium, and for a moment, we were newly stunned to be in such a residence, one without common walls or shared faucets, without cots that folded up and rolled into the corner, without a twenty-story trot down to a communal washtub.

Behind the security of Pubyok crime-scene tape, we began divvying up all of Commander Ga’s rice and movies. Titanic , our interns agreed, was the best movie ever made. I told Jujack to throw the Bibles off the balcony. You could maybe explain a satchel full of DVDs to an MPSS officer, but not those things.

At Division 42, I went through my daily session with Commander Ga, and except for what happened to the actress and her children, he was all too happy to give the whats and whys and wheres and whens of everything. Once again, he went over how Mongnan had implored him to put on the dead Commander’s uniform, and he reviewed the conversation with the Warden, sagging under the weight of a great rock, that allowed him to walk out of a prison camp. It’s true that when I first imagined Ga’s biography, it was the big moments that loomed large in the chapters, such as an underground showdown with the holder of the Golden Belt. But now it was a much more subtle book I was constructing, and only the hows mattered to me.

“I understand that you talked your way out of prison,” I said to Commander Ga. “But how did you summon the nerve to go to Sun Moon’s house? What did you say to her on the heels of killing her husband?”

Commander Ga had forsaken the bed by now. We leaned against opposite walls of the small room, smoking.

“Where else could I go?” he asked me. “What could I say but the truth?”

“And how did she respond?”

“She fell down and wept.”

“Of course she did. How did you get from there to sharing a cup?”

“Sharing a cup?”

“You know what I’m saying,” I told him. “How do you get a woman to love you, even though she knows you hurt people?”

“Is there someone you love?” Commander Ga asked me.

“I ask the questions around here,” I said, but I couldn’t let him think I had no one. I gave him a slight nod, one that suggested, Are we not both men?

“Then she loves you despite what you do?”

“What I do?” I asked him. “I help people. I save people from the treatment they’d get from those Pubyok animals. I’ve turned questioning into a science. You have your teeth, don’t you? Has anyone wrapped wire around your knuckles until your fingertips swelled purple and went dead? I’m asking how she loved you. You were a replacement husband. Nobody truly loves a replacement husband. It’s only their first family they care about.”

Commander Ga began speaking on the topic of love, but suddenly his voice became static in my ears. I couldn’t hear anything, for a notion had risen in my mind, the thought that maybe my parents had had a first family, that there were children before me that they lost and that I was a late, hollow replacement. That would account for their advanced ages and for the way that, when they looked at me, they seemed to see something that was lacking. And the fear in their eyes—might it not be the unbearable fear of losing me, too, a fear of the knowledge that they couldn’t handle going through such loss again?

I took the underground trolley to Central Records and pulled my parents’ files. All afternoon I read through them, and here I saw another reason that citizen biographies were needed: the files were filled with dates and stamps and grainy images and informant quotes and reports from housing blocks, factory committees, district panels, volunteer details, and Party boards. Yet there was no real information in them, no sense of who these two old people were, what brought them from Manpo to be line workers for life at the Testament to the Greatness of Machines Factory. In the end, though, the file’s only stamp from the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital was mine.

Back in Division 42, I headed to the Pubyok lounge, where I moved my placard “Interrogator Number 6” from “On Duty” to “Off.” Q-Kee and Sarge were laughing together, but when I entered, they went silent. So much for sexism. Q-Kee wasn’t wearing her smock, and there was no missing her figure as she leaned back in one of the Pubyok recliners.

Sarge held up a hand freshly wrapped with tape. Even with a head of silver hair, even in the year of his retirement, he’d broken his hand anew. He made a voice, like his hand was talking. “Did the doorjamb hurt me?” his hand asked. “Or did the doorjamb love me?”

Q-Kee could barely suppress her laughter.

Instead of interrogation manuals, the Pubyok bookcases were filled with bottles of Ryoksong, and I could guess how their night would go: faces would start to glow red, a few patriotic songs would get belted from the karaoke machine, and soon Q-Kee would be playing drunken table tennis with the Pubyok, all gathered ’round to watch her breasts as she leaned over, prowling her end of the table, swatting that red-hot paddle of hers.

“You about to clear a name from the board?” Q-Kee asked me.

Now it was Sarge who had his laugh.

At this point, I’d missed preparing my parents’ dinner, and since the trains had stopped, I’d have to cross the whole city in darkness in order to help them make their bedtime trip to the bathroom. But then I had a look at the big board, my first moment in weeks to really take a look at my workload. I had eleven active cases. All of the Pubyok together had one—some guy they were softening up till morning in the sump. The Pubyok close cases in forty-five minutes just by dragging people into the shop and helping them hold the confession pen in the moments before they expire. But here, looking at all those names, I understood how far my obsession with Ga had gone. My longest open case was my military nurse from Panmunjom, accused of flirting with an ROK officer across the DMZ. It was said she gave him pinkie waves and even blew kisses hard enough to float over the minefields. It was the easiest case on the board, really, which is why I kept putting it off. Her location on the board was marked as the “Down Cell,” and I realized I’d left her there for five days. I slid my placard back to “On Duty” and got out of there before the sniggering could set in.