Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“Actually, it’s raining,” he said. “A big storm’s coming in from the Yellow Sea.”

Sarge rubbed his palms together. Though he smiled, I could tell his hands were hurting.

I pointed at the big board. “I see there was a mass confession while I was out.”

Sarge shrugged. “We got a whole team of Pubyok with time on their hands. And here you were with ten open cases, just you and two interns. We were only showing some solidarity.”

“Solidarity?” I asked. “What happened to Leonardo?”

“Who?”

“My team leader, the baby-faced one. He left work one night and never came back. Like the rest of the guys who used to be on my team.”

“You’re asking me to solve one of life’s mysteries,” he said. “Who’s to say what becomes of people? Why does rain fall down and not up? Why was the snake created cowardly while the dog was born vicious?”

I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me or not. Sarge wasn’t exactly a philosopher. And since Leonardo’s disappearance, Sarge had acted strangely civil toward me.

I returned to the crudely penciled sketch of the Texas village.

He stood there, massaging his hands.

“My joints,” he said. “They’re murder when it rains.”

I ignored him.

Sarge looked over my shoulder. “What do you have there, some kind of map?”

“Some kind.”

He looked closer. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The old military base west of town.”

“What makes you say that?”

He pointed. “There’s the road to Nampo, and look, here’s the fork in the Taedong.” He turned to me. “This have to do with Commander Ga?”

Finally, the kind of lead we’d been looking for, the chance to crack this case wide open. I folded the map. “I’ve got work to do,” I said.

Sarge stopped me from leaving. “You know,” he said, “you don’t have to write an entire book about every citizen that comes through the door.”

But I did have to. Was anyone else going to tell a citizen’s story, was there going to be any other proof that someone ever existed? If I took the time to learn everything about them, if I made a record, then I was okay with the kinds of things that happened to them afterward. The autopilot, the prison mines, the soccer stadium at dawn. If I wasn’t a biographer, then who was I, what did I really do for a living?

“Am I getting through to you?” Sarge asked. “Nobody even reads those books. They gather dust in a dark room. So quit killing yourself. Try it our way for once. Knock out a few quick confessions, and then come have a beer with the guys. We’ll let you load the karaoke machine.”

“What about Commander Ga?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“His biography is the most important one.”

Sarge stared at me with cosmic frustration.

“First of all,” he said, “that’s not Commander Ga. Did you forget that? Second, he wouldn’t talk. He’s had pain training—the halo didn’t even touch him. Most important, there is no mystery to solve.”

“Of course there is,” I said. “Who is he? What happened to the actress? Where’s her body, her kids?”

“You think the guys at the top,” Sarge said, pointing down to the bunker below, “you think they don’t know the real story? They know where the Americans were hosted—they were there . You think the Dear Leader doesn’t know what happened? I bet Sun Moon was probably standing to his right, while Commander Ga was to his left.”

Then what was our purpose , I wondered. What was it we were interrogating , and why?

“If they have all the answers,” I said, “what are they waiting for? How long can the people wonder why our national actress has gone missing? And what about our national hero, the holder of the Golden Belt? How long can the Dear Leader not acknowledge they’ve mysteriously vanished?”

“Don’t you think the Dear Leader has his reasons?” Sarge asked me. “And just so you know: you don’t get to tell people’s stories, the state does. If a citizen does something worthy of a story, good or bad, then it’s up to the Dear Leader’s people. They’re the only ones who get to tell a story.”

“I don’t tell people’s stories. My job is to listen and write down what I hear. And if you’re talking about the boys from Propaganda, everything they say is a lie.”

Sarge stared at me in wonderment, as if only now did he realize the size of the gulf between us. “Your job …” he started to say. Then he started to say something else. He kept shaking his hands, trying to expel the pain. Finally, he turned to leave, pausing only a moment in the doorway.

“I did my training at that base,” he said. “You don’t want to be anywhere near Nampo during a storm.”

When he was gone, I called the Central Motor Pool and told them we’d need a vehicle to take us toward Nampo. Then I gathered Q-Kee and Jujack. “Round up some rain slickers and shovels,” I told them. “We’re going to fetch an actress.”

It turned out the only vehicle that could get us down the road to Nampo in the rain was an old Soviet Tsir. When it pulled up, the driver was none too happy, since someone had stolen his windshield wipers. Jujack shook his head at the sight and backed away.

“No way,” he said. “My father told me never to get in a crow.”

Q-Kee had a shovel in her hand. “Shut up and get in the truck,” she told him.

Soon, the three of us were headed west, into the storm. The dark canopy was made of oiled canvas, which kept the rain out, though sprays of muddy water rose through the slats in the bed. The bench seats we sat on had been carved with people’s names. It was probably the work of folks being transported to faraway prison mines like 22 or 14-18, voyages that would give a person lots of time to think. Such was the human urge to be remembered.

Q-Kee ran her fingers over the carvings, tracing one name in particular.

“I knew a Yong Yap-Nam,” she said. “He was in my Evils of Capitalism class.”

“It’s probably a different Yong Yap-Nam,” I reassured her.

She shrugged. “If a citizen goes bad, he goes bad. What else should he expect?”

Jujack wouldn’t look at any of the names. “Why don’t we wait till after the storm?” he kept saying. “What’s the point of going out there now? We probably won’t find anything. There’s probably nothing to find.”

The wind started to rattle the black canopy, its metal ribs groaning. A cascade of water poured from the road, sluicing over the sewage ditches. Q-Kee leaned her head on her shovel handle, staring out the back of the truck at the two channels our tires cut through the water.

Q-Kee asked me, “You don’t think Sun Moon could have gone bad, do you?”

I shook my head. “No way.”

“I want to find Sun Moon as much as anybody,” she said. “But then she’ll be dead. It’s like, until our shovels unearth her, she still seems alive.”

It’s true that when I’d been imagining finding Sun Moon, I’d been picturing the radiant woman on all the movie posters. It was only now that I visualized my shovel raising up pieces of decomposed children, of the shovel’s blade sinking into the abdomen of a corpse.

“When I was a girl, my father took me to see Glory of Glories . I’d been acting out a lot, and my father wanted me to see what happened to women who challenged authority.”

Jujack said, “That the movie where Sun Moon gets her head cut off?”

“It’s about more than that,” Q-Kee said.

“Good special effects, though,” Jujack added. “The way Sun Moon’s head rolls away and everywhere the blood spills, the flowers of martyrdom spring from the ground and blossom. That had me, man, I was there.”