Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Comrade Buc began lining fishing poles up against a tree. His hands were shaky. When he had them all set, a line snagged, and the poles fell over again. He looked at Ga, as if it were his fault. “But you,” he said. “You’re the one who tells.” He shook his head. “That’s why you’re different. Somehow the rules are different for you, and that’s why you maybe have a shot at making it.”

“You believe that?”

“Is the plan simple?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t tell me anything more. I don’t want to know.” There was thunder, and Buc looked up, gauging whether rain was imminent. “Just answer this—are you in love with her?”

“Love,” that was a very big word.

“If something happened to her,” Buc asked, “would you want to go on without her?”

Such a simple question—how had he not asked himself this? He felt her steady hand on his tattoo from the other night, the way she let him quietly weep in bed beside her. She didn’t even turn down the lantern so she wouldn’t have to look upon his vulnerability. She’d just watched him, concern in her eyes, until sleep drew near.

Ga shook his head no.

Headlights appeared in the distance. Buc and Ga turned to see a black car navigating the muddy ruts on the road. It wasn’t the Dear Leader’s caravan. As it neared, they could see its wipers were still on, so it had come from the direction of the storm.

Buc turned to him, so they were close. He spoke with urgency. “I’ll tell you what I know about how this world works. If you and Sun Moon go together with the kids, maybe there’s a chance you’ll make it, maybe. ” The first drops of rain fell. The ox lowered its head. “But if Sun Moon and the kids somehow get on that plane, yet you’re by the Dear Leader’s side, directing his focus, making excuses, diverting his attention, they’ll probably make it.” And here Comrade Buc let go of his permanent grin and laughing squint. When his face went slack, it was clear its natural state was seriousness. “It also means,” he said, “that you’ll absolutely be around to pay the price for this, rather than dutiful citizens like myself and my children.”

A lone figure was walking toward them. He was military, they could tell. As the rain thickened, he made no effort to shield himself, and they watched his uniform darken as he neared. Ga opened his spectacles and peered through them. For some reason, he could make out nothing of the man’s face, but the uniform was unmistakable: he was a commander.

Comrade Buc regarded the figure nearing them. “Fuck me,” he said, and turned to Ga. “You know what Dr. Song said about you? He said you had a gift, that you could say a lie while speaking the truth.”

“Why’d you tell me that?”

“Because Dr. Song never got the chance to tell you,” Buc said. “And here’s something I have to say to you. There’s probably no way you could pull this off without me. But if you stick around after this happens, if you stay and bear the burden, I’ll help you.”

“Why?”

“Because Commander Ga did the worst thing that’s ever been done to me. Then he went right on living next door. And I had to go on working on the same floor with him. I had to bend over and check his shoe size before I ordered his slippers from Japan. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him coming at me. When I lay with my wife, I felt Ga’s weight atop me. But you, you came along and fixed him for me. When you arrived, he vanished.”

Comrade Buc stopped and turned. Ga turned, too.

Then from the rain appeared the scarred face of Commander Park.

“Forget about me?” Park asked.

“Not at all,” Ga said. He watched beads of rain trace the wounds in Park’s face and wondered if this wasn’t the inspiration for the disfigured man in the Dear Leader’s script.

“There’s been a turn of events,” Commander Park said. “Comrade Buc and I are going to take inventory of the situation here.” He fixed his eyes on Ga. “And you, the Dear Leader will brief you himself. And after this is all said and done, perhaps you and I will have a chance to rekindle our friendship.”

“Ah, you’ve just come from Texas,” the Dear Leader said when he saw Commander Ga’s muddy boots. “What do you think? Is the ranch convincing?”

The Dear Leader was in a white hallway, deep underground, deciding which of two identical doors he should open. When the Dear Leader reached for one, the knob buzzed, and Ga could hear an electric lock unbolt.

“It was uncanny,” Ga said. “Like stepping into the Old West.”

Ga’s ears were still pulsing from the elevator’s plunge. His uniform was wet, and the underground cold penetrated him. How far below Pyongyang he was, he had no way of knowing. The bright fluorescent lights looked familiar, as did the white cement walls, but he could only wonder if they were on the same level as last time.

“Sadly,” the Dear Leader said, “I might not get a chance to behold it.”

Inside, the room was filled with gifts, awards, platters, and plaques, all with blank areas where inscriptions and occasions were to be engraved across the silver or bronze. The Dear Leader placed his hand on a rhinoceros horn, one in a set of bookends. “Mugabe keeps giving us these,” he said. “The Americans would piss Prozac if we surprised them with a pair of these. But that raises the question: what gift do you give a guest who travels a great distance to visit but won’t accept your hospitality?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Ga said.

The Dear Leader felt the tip of the rhino’s horn. “The Americans have informed us that this will not be a diplomatic mission after all. It is an exchange , they now say, which will take place at the airport. They ask that we bring our pretty rower there, and it will be on the runway, provided we supply a forklift, that they return what they stole from me.”

Ga was suddenly offended. “They won’t taste our corn biscuits or fire our pistols?”

The Dear Leader’s laugh lines went slack, and he regarded Ga with eyes so serious that a stranger would take them for sad. “In doing this, they steal from me something much larger.”

“What about the Texas ranch?” he asked the Dear Leader. “We’ve built it complete.”

“Dismantle it, move it to the airport,” he said. “Put it in a hangar where we can access it if we decide we can still use some of it.”

“Everything? The snakes, the river eels?”

“You have eels? Now I’m really sorry I missed it.”

Ga tried to visualize taking a hearth apart or a branding pit. That monstrous branding iron now seemed like a labor of love, and he couldn’t imagine it packed away in the cinema house’s property lot, as likely to see the light of day again as a hand-painted, silken flag of Texas.

“Do the Americans offer a reason?”

The Dear Leader’s eyes panned the room, trying, Ga could tell, to find a gift that might match his humiliation. “The Americans say there is a window two days from now in which no Japanese spy satellites will be flying over. The Americans fear the Japanese would be furious to learn that—Oh, fuck them!” the Dear Leader said. “Do they not know that on my soil they play by my rules! Do they not know that when their wheels touch the ground they are beholden to me, to my tremendous sense of duty!”

“I know the gift,” Commander Ga said.

The Dear Leader eyed him with suspicion.

“When our delegation left Texas, there were a couple of surprises at the airport.”

The Dear Leader said nothing.

“There were two pallets, the kind a forklift would use. The first was loaded with food.”

“A pallet of food? This was not in the report I read. No one confessed to that.”