Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

The nurse didn’t smell so good when I pulled her out. The light was devastating to her.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she said, wincing. “I’m really ready to talk. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I have some things to say.”

I took her to an interrogation bay and warmed up the autopilot. The whole thing was a shame, really. I had her biography half written—I’d probably wasted three afternoons on that. And her confession would practically write itself, but it wasn’t her fault—she’d just fallen through the cracks.

I reclined her on one of our baby-blue chairs.

“I’m ready to denounce,” she said. “There were many bad citizens who attempted to corrupt me, and I have a list, I’m ready to name them all.”

I could only think of what would happen if I didn’t get my father to a bathroom in the next hour. The nurse was wearing a medical gown, and I ran my hands along her torso to ensure that she was harboring no objects or jewelry that would interfere with the autopilot.

“Is that what you want?” she asked.

“What?”

“I’m ready to mend my relationship with my country,” she said. “I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to show my good citizenship.”

She lifted her gown so that it rose above her hips and the dark frost of her pubic hair was unmistakable. I was aware of how a woman’s body was constructed and of its major functions. And yet I didn’t feel in control again until the nurse was in her restraints, and I could hear the thrum of the autopilot’s initial probings. There is always that initial involuntary gasp, that full-body tense when the autopilot administers its first licks. The nurse’s eyes focused far away, and I ran my hand along her arm and across her collarbones. I could feel the charge moving through her. It entered me, made the hairs stand on the back of my hand.

Q-Kee was right to tease me; I’d let things slide, and here was our nurse, paying the price. At least we had the autopilot. When I first arrived at Division 42, the preferred method of reforming corrupted citizens was the lobotomy. As interns, Leonardo and I performed many. The Pubyok would grab whatever subjects were handy and in the name of training, we’d do a half-dozen in a row. All you needed was a twenty-centimeter nail. You’d lay the subject out on a table and sit on his chest. Leonardo, standing, would steady the subject’s head, and with his thumbs, hold both eyelids open. Careful not to puncture anything, you’d run the nail in along the top of the eyeball, maneuvering it until you felt the bone at the back of the socket. Then with your palm, you gave the head of the nail a good thump. After punching through the orbital, the nail moved freely through the brain. Then it was simple: insert fully, shimmy to the left, shimmy to the right, repeat with other eye. I wasn’t a doctor or anything, but I tried to make my actions smooth and accurate, not gruff like the Pubyok, whose broken hands made any delicate work apelike. I found a strong light proved most humane as the subjects were blinded to what was happening.

We were told there were whole lobotomy collectives where former subversives now knew nothing but good-natured labor for the benefit of all. But the truth proved far different. I went with Sarge once, when I was but a month in the smock, to interrogate a guard at one of these collectives, and we discovered no model labor farm. The actions of all were blunted and stammering. The laborers would rake the same patch of ground countless times and witlessly fill in holes they’d just dug. They cared not whether they were clothed or naked and relieved themselves at will. Sarge wouldn’t stop commenting on what he thought was the indolence of the lobotomized, their group sloth. Shock-work whistles meant nothing to them, he said, and it seemed impossible to engender any notion of Juche spirit. He said, “Even children know how to step to the wheel!”

But it was the slack faces of the braincut you never forget—the babies in the jars on display in the Glories of Science Museum have more life. That trip proved to me that the system was broken, and I knew one day I’d play a role in fixing it. Then along came the autopilot, developed by a deep-bunker think tank, and I jumped at the chance to field-test it.

The autopilot is a hands-free piece of electronic wizardry. It’s not some brutal application of electricity like one of the Pubyok’s car batteries. The autopilot works in concert with the mind, measuring brain output, responding to alpha waves. Every consciousness has an electrical signature, and the autopilot’s algorithm learns to read that script. Think of its probing as a conversation with the mind, imagine it in a dance with identity. Yes, picture a pencil and an eraser engaged in a beautiful dance across the page. The pencil’s tip bursts with expression—squiggles, figures, words—filling the page, as the eraser measures, takes note, follows in the pencil’s footsteps, leaving only blankness in its wake. The pencil’s next seizure of scribbles is perhaps more intense and desperate, but shorter lived, and the eraser follows again. They continue in lockstep this way, the self and the state, coming closer to one another until finally the pencil and the eraser are almost one, moving in sympathy, the line disappearing even as it’s laid down, the words unwritten before the letters are formed, and finally there is only white. The electricity often gives male subjects tremendous erections, so I’m not convinced the experience is all bad. I looked at the empty blue chair next to the nurse—to catch up, I’d probably have to start doing two at a time.

But back to my nurse. She was in a deep cycle now. The convulsions had hiked her gown again, and I hesitated before pulling it back down. Before me was her secret nest. I leaned over and inhaled deeply, breathing in—crackling bright—the ozone scent that rose from her. Then I loosened her restraints and turned out the light.

WHEN Commander Ga arrived at the site of the artificial Texas, a morning mist hung in the air. The landscape was rolling and tree-covered, so the area’s watchtowers and surface-to-air-missile ramps couldn’t be seen. They were downstream from Pyongyang, and though you could not see the Taedong River, you could smell it in every breath, swollen and green. It had been raining recently, an early monsoon off the Yellow Sea, and with the mud and dripping willow trees, it seemed a far cry from the desert of Texas.

He parked the Mustang and stepped out. There was no sign of the Dear Leader’s entourage. Only Comrade Buc was here, sitting alone at a picnic table with a cardboard box. Buc beckoned him over, where Ga could see that the table’s slats had been carved with initials in English. “Every last detail,” he said to Buc.

Buc nodded at the box. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said.

When Commander Ga looked at the box, he had a sudden feeling that inside was an object that had once belonged to the real Commander Ga. He didn’t have a sense of whether it was a jacket or a hat or why Buc would be in possession of such a thing, he only felt that what was inside had belonged to his predecessor and that when he opened the box and came in contact with the thing, when he touched it and accepted it, the real Commander Ga would hold a power over him.

“You open it,” he said to Buc.

Comrade Buc reached into the box and removed a pair of black cowboy boots.

Ga took them, turned them in his hands—they were the same pair he’d held in Texas.

“How’d you find these?” he asked.

Buc didn’t answer, but gave a grin of pride that he could find any item on earth, anywhere, and fetch it to Pyongyang.

Ga removed his dress shoes, which, he now realized, actually had belonged to his predecessor. They’d been at least a size too large. When he sank his feet into the cowboy boots, they fit perfectly. Buc took one of Commander Ga’s dress shoes and studied it.