Strangers Among Us

by Kelley Armstrong

  The spacecraft simulator rocked gently back and forth. Inside, Ha Neul gazed at the images of Earth projected on the fake window.

  Outside, Yoon Ah and Bon Hwa looked at the monitor showing Ha Neul’s vital signs.

  “You’re breathing too quickly,” Yoon Ah said over the radio. “Calm down.”

  “Temperature is okay, but heart rate and blood pressure are high,” Bon Hwa said.

  “Cosmonaut Lee, please relax,” Yoon Ah urged. “Let Mission Control do all the work.”

  Ha Neul moaned over the radio.

  They watched the simulator rise languidly. Bon Hwa shook his head.

  “This simulator can’t provide weightlessness. We need a reduced gravity aircraft,” Bon Hwa said. “Well, at least it won’t upset his stomach.”

  “I feel sick,” Ha Neul said.

  Jang and Hong arrived. The Flight Director looked at Ha Neul’s vital signs and frowned. “Is he in any condition to carry out orders from the ground in case of emergency?” Jang asked.

  “Let’s try,” Yoon Ah said, handing a microphone to Jang. “What do you have in mind?”

  Jang said into the microphone, “Cosmonaut Lee, this is Flight Director Jang. Do you read me?”

  Ha Neul moaned.

  Jang shook his head. “Comrade Cosmonaut, there has been a malfunction in the uplink to the broadcast system. I authorize you to take manual control of the ship. Press the play button of the audio player.”

  No sound came from the simulator.

  “Did he press the button?” Jang asked.

  Hong looked at the monitor. “No, he did not.”

  “Cosmonaut Lee, do you acknowledge my order?” Jang said.

  Again, no sound came from the simulator.

  “His heart rate and blood pressure are sky high,” Bon Hwa reported.

  “Get him out of there,” Yoon Ah ordered.

  The technicians opened the simulator’s door and pulled Ha Neul from his seat. He looked relieved to get out.

  “How could anyone get nervous riding a children’s toy?” Yoon Ah complained.

  The simulator was a ride from Rungna People’s Pleasure Park. It did not simulate the G-force, weightlessness, or movements of actual space flight. But it was the best simulator NADA could get. Dear Leader had killed the Chinese before they could build a simulator.

  “The simulated images of Earth were very frightening,” Ha Neul said.

  “I know training is difficult, but on the day of the mission, you have to stay calm,” Bon Hwa said. “Think of your family.”

  Ha Neul looked down at the floor. He would panic in space and bring shame and Hostile songbun to his family.

  “Cosmonaut Lee, you could not even press a button, the simplest task possible!” Jang scolded. “Do not embarrass Dear Leader! The consequences of failure are unspeakable. Do you acknowledge?”

  “Yes, Comrade Flight Director,” Ha Neul stammered.

  After dinner, Ha Neul and Bon Hwa watched videos of Russian, American, and Chinese space flights in the cosmonaut lounge. Dear Leader banned ordinary Koreans from watching foreign space flights; Koreans did not need to know that foreigners had technology more advanced than theirs. However, Yoon Ah used her Elite songbun to get the videos from the State Commission for Science and Technology.

  “Look how easily these foreigners fly in space,” Bon Hwa said. A Russian cosmonaut waved at his TV audience as his spaceship blasted off. “Imagine yourself like him.”

  Ha Neul closed his eyes. He saw himself riding the rocket, smiling at the camera, calmly reporting on his ship’s systems to Mission Control.

  “Can you see yourself flying into space like him?” Bon Hwa asked.

  Ha Neul nodded silently.

  “Good,” said Bon Hwa. “You must learn to visualize without me. I will not be with you in the spaceship.”

  “But you will talk to me from Mission Control, won’t you?”

  Bon Hwa shook his head. “No, I won’t be there either. There will be ten foreign journalists in the Media Office. Regulations require a military officer of sergeant’s rank or above to monitor them. All such officers except me will be either guarding the launch centre or marching in Dear Leader’s parade. I will be at the Media Office.”

  “Oh,” said Ha Neul.

  “I have to go home now, while the trams still get electricity. Continue practicing visualization without me.”

  Bon Hwa went home, leaving Ha Neul alone to watch the videos. A half hour later, the blackout began, shutting off the lights and the video player.

  His concentration crumbled. The lounge was like a tomb, all dark and silent. He thought only of plane crashes and dead pilots.

  Ha Neul remembered Bon Hwa had saved his life by taking control of the plane as they returned from China. Since then, he could not calm down without Bon Hwa urging him.

  Without Bon Hwa, he would fail in his mission and disgrace Dear Leader in front of the entire world. He would be dead without Bon Hwa.

  LAUNCH DATE:

  January 8, Juche 122: the entire nation celebrated Dear Leader’s fiftieth birthday. In Pyongyang, fifty thousand people sang and paraded through Kim Il Sung Square. At Musudan-ri, a sole cosmonaut, Ha Neul, blasted into space on different mission to honour Dear Leader.

  The amusement park ride was nothing like real space flight. Ha Neul thought the G-force and violent shaking would tear his body apart. He urinated in his spacesuit.

  The Chollima 1 spacecraft separated from the Unha-10 rocket. As the booster fell into the East Sea, Chollima 1 went into a low-Earth orbit.

  The weightlessness turned his stomach. Ha Neul forced himself not to vomit.

  He looked out the window. Chollima 1 flew one hundred and seventy kilometres above the Earth, about the same altitude that Gagarin had flown, seventy-two years earlier. Ha Neul thought of the distance between him and the ground. A new jolt of fear ran through his body.

  At Mission Control, Yoon Ah stared at the cosmonaut’s vital signs on a monitor. “He’s hyperventilating. We better calm him down before Dear Leader watches the flight. Where is Dear Leader now?”

  Jang looked at the TV. “He’s still at the parade.”

  They watched a computer graphic of the flight on the large screen. Chollima 1’s orbit stabilized.

  “Given the time and budget, we’re extremely lucky,” Jang said. “The flight is as good as any by another country.”

  Ha Neul moaned over the radio.

  “But we can’t have our cosmonaut whimpering like a dog when Dear Leader watches the flight,” said Yoon Ah. “He needs to behave like a national hero.”

  During the second orbit, Flight Director Jang’s cell phone beeped. He read the email and grabbed a microphone.

  “Attention, all staff,” he said. “Dear Leader will watch the flight thirty minutes from now.”

  The Mission Control crew murmured. Yoon Ah ran to Jang. “That’s an hour earlier than we expected.”

  “Lunch with the Cabinet ended early,” Jang explained. “He’s running ahead of schedule.”

  “We better test the broadcasting system now,” Yoon Ah said.

  Jang went to Hong. “Let’s run a test. Play the song.”

  Hong nodded and pressed a button.

  Nothing happened.

  “Hey, Hong, what’s going on?” Jang asked.

  Hong looked worried. “The uplink failed. The ship’s broadcasting system isn’t receiving our signal.”

  A drop of sweat flowed down Jang’s forehead for the first time. “If we can’t get the song playing, we’ll all be punished.” The Flight Director swayed.

  Yoon Ah suggested, “Can we play the song from here, feed it into the Korean Central Television signal, and fake a broadcast from space?”

  “The government has told the foreign countries to listen for the song,” Jang said. “They will report that no broadcast from space occurred. Our own people won’t know the difference, but Dear Leader receives foreign news. He’ll know what the fore
ign countries think of our failure.”

  “Then we have to depend on Cosmonaut Lee,” Yoon Ah said.

  Ha Neul moaned over the radio.

  Jang said, “This is Mission Control to Chollima 1. Chollima 1, do you read me?”

  Ha Neul moaned again.

  Jang and Yoon Ah watched the video feed from the spaceship. Ha Neul looked stricken with panic.

  “He never got cured,” said Yoon Ah.

  “That didn’t matter as long as Mission Control did everything for him,” Jang said, “but now, he’s on his own.”

  Jang said, “Mission Control to Chollima 1. Chollima 1, do you read me?”

  “Aaack—yes!” Ha Neul replied.

  “Cosmonaut Lee, I need you to test the broadcasting system. Press the ‘play’ button. That is all you have to do.”

  They watched the video feed. Ha Neul did not press the play button. They could see the fear in his eyes.

  “Are we going to crash?” Ha Neul asked.

  Hong said, “Director Jang, tell Cosmonaut Lee that the on-board playback mechanism will work. It will not fail! I personally tested it twenty times. He can have confidence in it.”

  “I don’t think it matters if he thinks your machine works or not,” said Jang.

  Yoon Ah looked at the monitor showing Korean Central Television. Dear Leader’s limousine drove towards Ryongsong Residence.

  “Can we send the KCTV signal to the spaceship?” she asked.

  “Hong, get to it,” Jang ordered.

  On the Chollima’s video monitor, the scene suddenly changed from Mission Control to the Ryongsong Residence. Ha Neul watched in disbelief as Dear Leader got out of his limousine and walked through the grounds of his palace.

  Why are they showing me Dear Leader’s birthday news? Ha Neul wondered.

  Instead of the news announcer’s narration, Yoon Ah’s voice came with the news video. “Cosmonaut Lee, this is Director Cho. Look at the TV news. Dear Leader has gone home. He will watch the space flight soon. Do your duty! Do not embarrass Dear Leader!”

  Ha Neul sweated and panted as he watched Dear Leader stroll through the gardens of Ryongsong Residence. Dear Leader’s smile inspired both love and terror.

  “All of us depend on you. Your family depends on you,” Yoon Ah urged.

  I can do it without Bon Hwa, Ha Neul silently told himself. I must do it without Bon Hwa. I need to prove to Bon Hwa that I can do it.

  Ha Neul closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He saw himself as a heroic cosmonaut. He imagined pressing the button, hearing the song play, bringing the ship back to Earth, and shaking hands with Dear Leader.

  He smelled the fragrant flowers that the Youth Corps would give him at welcoming ceremony. He tasted the salty pork that would come with his increased rations. He felt his mother’s warm embrace as they moved into a luxury apartment.

  Jang’s cell phone beeped. He looked at the email and frowned.

  “Damn, we’ve run out of time,” he muttered.

  Jang stood at attention and said, “Comrade Cosmonaut Lee, Dear Leader orders you to play his theme song on the designated frequency. Perform your duty to the Fatherland.”

  No sound came from the spaceship.

  Then Ha Neul broke the silence. “Flight Director Jang, I acknowledge the order and will perform my duty. Glory to Dear Leader and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea!”

  Yoon Ah gasped and cried with joy.

  Ha Neul pressed the play button.

  The song “Kim Jong Un, We Follow Only You” played.

  Ha Neul sighed in relief. He heard people applauding in Mission Control.

  All over the Earth, foreigners heard Dear Leader’s song from space. The Korean Central News Agency announced, “Today, the Korean people, led by their Dear Leader on his birthday, began their conquest of space. The radio signal of Dear Leader’s theme song will travel into the cosmos forever, symbolizing the eternal spirit of the Korean people and the Juche Idea.”

  Ha Neul orbited the Earth four times. KCNA bragged, “Under Dear Leader’s guidance, Cosmonaut Lee completed one orbit more than did John Glenn, the Yankee aggressor pilot who attacked Korea in the Fatherland Liberation War.”

  The crew module separated from the service module, descended back to Earth, deployed its parachutes, and landed on the Chaeryong Plain. According to KCNA, “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has a terrain of mostly hills, mountains, and valleys. Its plains are few and small. Landing a spaceship on a plain was a triumph of Dear Leader’s technology and science.”

  Ha Neul smiled for the TV cameras as the ground crew helped him out of the spacecraft.

  Two days later, Dear Leader visited Musudan-ri Rocket Launch Centre. Dear Leader promoted Ha Neul to First Lieutenant and pinned the Hero Cosmonaut badge to his Air Force uniform. Again, Ha Neul smiled for the cameras.

  The most important event of Dear Leader’s visit came next. All the Mission Control crew gathered on the auditorium stage for a group photo with Dear Leader. They wore their best clothes and red Dear Leader lapel pins.

  Dear Leader stood to Ha Neul’s left. To Ha Neul’s right stood Bon Hwa and Hong. Ha Neul had insisted that they stand with him in the front row. Jang relented and let the two low songbun men stand beside the Hero Cosmonaut.

  After the photographer snapped the photo, everyone cheered. They jumped up and down and waved their arms above their heads, as if they were at Dear Leader’s birthday parade.

  Dear Leader smiled and waved at them, overjoyed by their love for him. But they were also cheering for themselves. Their songbun had just increased.

  Bon Hwa grinned. “Remember me if you get to hire staff. I want to work for a national hero. The guy who won the Olympic Gold Medal for archery is on the Olympic Committee now. His personal secretary gets two hundred grams of pork per day. Two hundred grams!”

  “I’ll get you a job, Flight Sergeant,” Ha Neul said. “I’ll call you when I settle into Pyongyang.”

  Ha Neul left to catch the train to Onsong. Although he had flown in space, he preferred to travel by train.

  Ha Neul and his parents moved from Onsong to Pyongyang. Their apartment had its own bathroom and a flush toilet. Clean water flowed from the kitchen faucet. The elevators worked. Electricity ran until twenty-three hundred hours, when the day’s TV broadcast ended. They each received three hundred grams of food per day. Pyongyang was paradise.

  Mother hummed the children’s song, “We Have Nothing to Envy in the World.” She had finally regained the status that her ancestors lost. The family was Elite again.

  Just like in Onsong, Dear Leader’s portrait hung in the living room. But now, they also hung photos of Dear Leader in their bedrooms, in the kitchen, in the small hallway, and on the closet doors. Dear Leader looked at them everywhere.

  They owed everything they had, from the food they ate to the clothes they wore, to Dear Leader. Putting his picture all over their apartment was the least they could do to thank him for his generosity.

  One night, the TV announcer ended the day’s broadcast by saying, “Think about serving Dear Leader in all your achievements. Good night and sleep well.”

  But when Ha Neul fell asleep, he did not think of Dear Leader. He dreamed about himself, Hero Cosmonaut of Korea.

  WHAT YOU SEE (WHEN THE LIGHTS ARE OUT)

  Gemma Files

  What’s done by night appears by day.

  —Folk saying

  Ciara wakes early, just after the sun’s gone down, and when she raises a corner of the blind to check the weather, the sky above looks like beach granite: sandy-grey, pink-streaked, wet. She knows she’s been dreaming, but can’t remember of what—not unusual in itself, just a side-effect of those pills, her diamond-shaped little yellow-and-white passports back into real life. The only things keeping her rooted, in an increasingly rootless world.

  There are ten texts from Garth already. They nestle in the centre of her phone’s display in descending order of immediacy,
waiting for her to unlock one with a right-sliding touch, a reversed prayer-tree of supplicant curses—

  hey bitch what the fuck u no up yet

  ring ring waht u playin

  need u c come on

  call me job 4 u

  job 4 u 2nite

  JOB like J-O-B

  u like money?

  Ciara frowns down at the phone, tongue itching with mood stabilizers, head a little slow (as always). Taken by themselves, the messages mystify her, too cryptic to be insulting; after all, Garth already knows she likes money, and that she sleeps late. She wishes he’d learn how to spell, or even just spell-check.

  Then she thinks about it a little more, and realizes her error: hyperbole, exaggeration, “charm.” It’d probably sound very different in person, even if she still wouldn’t be able to tell whether Garth was putting her on simply by looking at him. Ciara registers and interprets other people’s emotions best at an angle, obliquely; though that does start to change the longer she’s known someone, and she and Garth go way back. All the way back to the last time she was in Shepherd’s Flock, at the very least.

  She shuts her eyes for a moment, replays eight months’ worth of bad breakfasts and worse dinners, of unbroken seclusion and restraint on moral grounds, of Sister Pfister thumbing through quotes on BibleGateway.com, searching by keyword and picking through what she found at random. Halfway through last June, the term of the day was “darkness,” closely followed by “night,” which at least seemed apt, given Ciara’s state of mind at the time: Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth—Psalms, 104:20; Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge—Psalms too, 19:2.

  Garth, who worked at Shepherd’s Flock as an orderly, is the one thing she’s kept from that period of her life, or possibly the one thing she’s allowed to keep her, in all senses of the phrase. Without him, she’d have no home, no cash, no structure to what remains of her life. No friends or family either, she supposes—but then, that goes without saying.