by Adam Johnson
“You know who’s crazy for lottery tickets?” he asked. “Malaysians. All our contractors were Malay. Over in Iraq, I mean. They were Muslim, but friendly, I guess, so they outfitted our base. I was Zaytun Division. Anyway, they couldn’t gamble, but the lottery was somehow okay. That’s all they seemed to care about. Come Friday, there was a sandstorm of discarded tickets blowing around the base.” The veteran tossed him a coin.
“What’s this for?” DJ asked.
“That’s a scratcher, right? You need something to scratch with.”
DJ rolled to his side so the veteran could see. The ticket had three columns, and you got to scratch a jewel from each. DJ picked a diamond and then a sapphire and then another sapphire.
“What’s the verdict?” the veteran asked.
“I lost.”
“Believe me,” the veteran said, “that’s a good thing. Don’t ever waste your luck. When I was over there, everything was booby-trapped. Man, all I wanted was to get out. We weren’t in combat or anything. That was the Americans. But anything you came across might blow up—a car, a Dumpster, a pile of trash. And shit blew, trust me, I saw it. I had to take pills to sleep. The funny thing is, now I can’t stop thinking about that place. When I close my eyes, Iraq is all I see.”
DJ studied the losing ticket. He scratched away the remaining top coating and saw that South Korean tickets were different. If he had picked a diamond, a sapphire and an emerald, the card would have paid twenty thousand won. Every ticket was capable of winning if you played it right, which meant your fate was no one’s but your own.
—
The next day DJ met Mina in front of his dormitory. They’d agreed to work the Black subway line, heading toward Onsu, but when she arrived, she seemed in no hurry. She sat on the smokers’ bench, accordion case in her lap.
“What kind of men sleep here?” she asked. “Are they scoundrels? Are they hiding out?”
DJ hadn’t seen the question coming. “I think they’re just guys with problems,” he said.
“Do you believe in second chances?” she asked. “Can people change their nature?”
DJ leaned against the bus shelter. “Those are two different questions,” he said.
“This is the kind of place my husband would stay in,” Mina said. She watched a couple of haggard-looking men emerge from the dorm and wince from the cold. “When I was a girl, I was known as someone who would push back. If you took my food, I would return the favor and then some. People knew not to cross me. That was my whole reputation. When my husband left, people shook their heads. When he disappeared with our savings, they clucked their tongues and said, ‘That poor man. Mina will hunt him to the ends of the world.’ That’s who I was. And that’s what I did.”
“Yeah?”
“The funny thing is, no one here knows me. I don’t have to be that person.”
“Quit looking for him, then. Quit playing the subways.”
“But then who would I be?” she asked.
DJ had no answer for that.
From down the street came honking and shouting. They turned to see a black BMW sedan slowly making its way toward them. It was headed the wrong way down a one-way street, its driver yelling at everyone in his path. When the car pulled up, they saw Sun-ho at the wheel.
A driver pulled up in front of the BMW and lifted his arms in confusion. Sun-ho leaned on the horn and left-handed a fistful of chicken bones onto the guy’s hood.
DJ approached the sedan. “You trying to get yourself killed?”
“No,” Sun-ho said. “It’s lunchtime.” He held up a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
“It’s not Friday,” DJ said.
“Tell that to the wind,” Sun-ho said. “It’s blowing north today. Get in before it changes its mind.”
The backseat was packed with balloons, so Mina and DJ squeezed in front with the accordion. Sun-ho dropped the car in gear and raced into oncoming traffic. Pressed up against Sun-ho, DJ noticed the new down coat he was wearing.
“Looks like someone’s been shopping,” DJ said.
“One of those sexy Gangnam moms took me to the Shilla duty-free store. I still haven’t recovered. Plus, those ladies keep giving me their old Samsungs,” Sun-ho said, handing DJ and Mina each a phone.
“What do I do with this?” DJ asked.
“Do I need to explain everything?” Sun-ho asked. “When you acquire a Samsung, you’re deemed a good defector. You’re granted immediate citizenship. Next the government gives you a Hyundai, a flag and a Bible.”
DJ lifted his hands. “Who pissed in your porridge?” he asked.
“With a Samsung,” Sun-ho said, “you can update your speed-dating profile and receive texts from Yesu-Nim Himself. With that blessing, you’ll become an important South Korean businessman and start your own Internet. Finally, you’ll achieve celebrity defector status. Yes, you’ll start your own show, The DJ Hour. Here you’ll have soulful interviews with beautiful defectors like Mina here.”
Mina shook her head. “See why I thought he was your father?”
Sun-ho said, “Oh yes, it’s easy to make fun of old Sun-ho—until the day you need him. Do you remember that day, DJ? The day you needed me?”
With a right turn, Sun-ho joined a proper traffic flow onto a northbound highway ramp.
“I don’t forget,” DJ said.
“What day is this?” Mina asked.
“Oh, this is a very entertaining story,” Sun-ho said. “DJ tells it best, don’t you, DJ?”
DJ threw Mina a look.
“Go on,” she said.
“The story starts with a man named Jong-il,” DJ said.
“I have never met this Jong-il, by the way,” Sun-ho said. “If he exists.”
“Jong-il and I went to engineering school together,” DJ continued. “Jong-il’s father was very cunning. He named his son after Kim Il-sung’s son because no one could ever give offense to someone who shared the Dear Leader’s name. Jong-il was smart, and the two of us were very competitive. One week I was the top student. The next it was Jong-il. We fought constantly for the top spot, always trying to outdo each other. But there was respect, too. If I discovered there would be a surprise exam, I would tell Jong-il, and he would do the same. In the end, I finished number one.”
“Sounds like this story will have a happy ending,” Sun-ho said. “I bet everything’s going to work out just fine.”
“So Jong-il ends up in Wonsan, making fake pharmaceuticals. The pill part is simple—they simply use laxative powders, which machines then shape and color. He shares his labs with Man-seok, also from our school, who makes real drugs, like ecstasy. The key to faking medicine is the packaging, so Jong-il uses my press to make four-color labels and blister foils.”
“Your press?” Mina asked.
“Long story,” DJ said. “One day Jong-il calls me. He says there’s been a mistake. He says there was a mix-up, that some bad medicine went to Pyongyang rather than China, and people in the capital are sick. He says that heads are rolling and Man-seok’s team is gone. He says trucks have come for him; they’re pulling up out front. ‘Run,’ Jong-il tells me. Then the call is over.”
“Does Dongjoo inform me of this?” Sun-ho asks Mina. “Of course not. He comes to me and says to cut the power, send everyone home, grab all the lottery tickets and bring the car around. Dongjoo, he knows design and accounting and specs and all that. I know people. That’s what I deal with. I know when someone’s lying. I would have known right away this was a trick—first there is a mess-up in production and then also a mess-up in shipping? These are people who don’t mess up. Who gets our operation when we suddenly defect? Jong-il does, that’s who.”
“Mess-ups happen,” DJ said. “We made them. What about the Lexus train? What about Mahjong Madness? Did you forget burning those ten thousand tickets?”
Sun-ho says, “So we’re driving north for the border, just like we are now. ‘Faster’ is all Dongjoo will say. He tells me nothing.”
“Admit the truth,” Sun-ho said. “You were thinking, Sun-ho knows the border guards, he crosses all the time. While you yourself have never crossed.”
“I was thinking how ugly it would be that after years of friendship, I would go free and you would not.”
“You had never seen the outside world. You didn’t know a single person in China. You didn’t know the first thing about the real world. You were afraid.”
“I was afraid they would kill you.”
For a moment, Sun-ho simply drove. The only sounds were balloons mobbing one another in the windy backseat.
“So he doesn’t inform me that we’re defecting. Can you believe that? I had no idea I was leaving home forever. I don’t get to say goodbye to anyone, I don’t get to see Willow or even hear her voice one last time.”
“Who’s Willow?” Mina asked.
Sun-ho said, “Why don’t you tell Mina what you told the border guard?”
“That was a mistake,” DJ said. “I never denied that.”
“We’re at the bridge,” Sun-ho told Mina. “On the other side is China. I cross once a month to deliver lottery tickets and to sign for car shipments. So I’m passing cigarettes all around, just like normal, when Dongjoo rolls down the back window and says, ‘We’ll never see you again.’ To the border guard. The guard says, ‘What?’ Dongjoo says, ‘And you’re going to die here.’ The guard gets this serious look on his face, and when he places a hand on that holster, I step on the gas. That’s why I couldn’t just drop Dongjoo off in China and hand out some more cigarettes on my return.”
“I said it in a sad way,” DJ said. “I was thinking, I’ll never see these hills again, I’ll never see Chongjin again, I’ll never see my folks. And that guard, he was just a boy, he couldn’t have been nineteen. I said exactly what I was thinking, that we were leaving and that every one of them would die there.”
“What happened?” Mina asked.
“What happened?” Sun-ho barked. “This happened. We’re stuck in South Korea!”
Mina flinched at his anger. “I mean, was it a trick? What happened to your business? Is Jong-il in charge?”
DJ stared through the window at the grey, blue-roofed suburbs. “We don’t know,” he said.
“I know,” Sun-ho said. Through his teeth, he said, “I know.”
—
Overcast skies hovered above the DMZ parking lot, with low grey clouds moving steadily north.
Sun-ho parked behind a row of tour buses. From the backseat, he wrestled a large array of silver Mylar balloons printed with many variations of Happy Birthday. Despite the cold, Sun-ho removed his new jacket and tied it on. “My mistake last time,” he said, “was launching from the border, where the guards patrol. This jacket has a long journey ahead, and an extra kilometer won’t make a difference.”
DJ watched the balloons twist in the wind, straining to deliver their lightweight cargo. He’d imagined the burger and now the jacket floating off to a field worker, but the wind was due north, a flight path taking it over Panmunjeom and Gaesong City on a vector to Pyongyang. In his imagination, the balloons were headed directly for his parents in Potonggang, and when the cargo got closer, when he imagined his folks on their balcony, arms open and facing south, when the bird’s-eye view was close enough to see their faces, their expressions, how they’d aged—there was nothing; his imagination simply turned off.
Mina pointed across the parking lot. “What’s going on over there?”
DJ turned to see. Past the buses was a group circled around several tall, clear balloons, each a couple stories high. Surrounding them were video cameras and a microphone on a pole.
“I bet it’s one of those celebrity defectors,” Sun-ho said. “With her big eyes and sad story, out to get famous by telling the world how victimized and pathetic we are.”
When they neared, though, they saw that the defector was a man, about DJ’s age and Sun-ho’s size. He wore a suit and a smile and a name tag that read Seo. He was directing the filling of balloons from brown cylinders, and the loading of baskets with thousands of flyers.
Seo approached Sun-ho and handed him a flyer. It read Kim Jong-un Is a War Criminal, followed by quotes from a UN report.
“You’re from the North, I can tell,” Seo said. “Come, help us spread the word.”
Sun-ho gave back the flyer. “What do you think people are going to do with these? It’s cold in the North. Unless you’re including matches, those leaflets will be worthless.”
“You’re wrong,” Seo said. “We must get the word out.”
“They know they’re suffering, they don’t need you to tell them the regime is bad.”
“Do they know?” Seo asked. “In secret, I suspected. But I had no way of knowing. Perhaps if I had come across a flyer, sent from the South by people who cared—well, my suspicions would’ve been confirmed. Maybe I would’ve acted sooner.”
“This is a jacket,” Sun-ho said. “Jackets are good things to send in the winter. It’s lightweight, down-filled. Look, it says North Face right here. North Face is the best. In this pocket are some energy bars.” Sun-ho opened a pocket to display two Samsung phones inside. “There’s also a map.” Sun-ho reached into another pocket and removed some Fortune Smiles.
“Are those lottery tickets?” Seo asked.
Sun-ho looked down, frustrated. “The map’s in the other pocket,” he said.
Seo asked, “No offense, but your plan is to send oppressed people a designer jacket and a long shot at good fortune? What they need is the truth.”
“I don’t believe in fortune,” Sun-ho said. “These tickets are all winners.”
“How could you know that?”
Gritting his teeth, Sun-ho stood silent.
“Kim Jong-un is a human rights violator,” Seo said. “The UN made it official. The most important thing we can send is news. First you free the mind. Then the body will follow.”
“Thanks for the philosophy,” Sun-ho said. “How about we do a thought experiment? Let’s release our balloons at the same time and then imagine the people in the fields who see them floating in. One balloon carries pamphlets. The other delivers a warm down jacket stuffed with cell phones, food and winning lottery tickets. Let’s imagine which one the citizens run toward.”
“There’s no way you’re launching your balloons with mine.”
“Why’s that? Are you scared of the truth?”
“What is today’s date?” Seo asked.
“February thirteenth,” Sun-ho said.
“And you were born in North Korea?”
Sun-ho got a suspicious look on his face. “Yeah.”
“And who was born on February sixteenth?”
Sun-ho grimaced. “Kim Jong-il,” he said.
“And what is the message printed on your balloons?”
Sun-ho couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“I’m trying to send dispatches of truth and solidarity,” Seo said. “You’ll appear to be sending gifts and well-wishes in honor of the Dear Leader.”
“So it might seem to some,” Sun-ho said, and released the jacket, which sailed quickly north. Then he neared Seo, so the two were in each other’s breath. “There is a bit of truth and solidarity you can share with me,” Sun-ho added. “Tell me where you get those big balloons.”
—
Two nights later, the cell phone Sun-ho had given DJ rang. DJ sat up in his bunk. There was only the sound of men snoring and a faint city-glow through the security windows. He had the eerie feeling he’d awakened in the North. For a moment, he felt that beyond the metal bunks and concrete room stood the steel skeletons of abandoned factories, and past that the icy calm of the moonlit East Sea.
On nights he’d wake like this in Chongjin, he’d drink scorched rice water and stare out the window at the fields of cars they had to work on, cars once owned by people whose lives he tried and tried to imagine.
The phone thrummed in his hand. DJ pulled the scratchy wool blanket around him. He touched the screen. “Yes,” he whispered.
“This is Assistant Inspector Kang, at Samseong Station. We have a gentleman in custody who won’t give his name. This number was the only contact in his phone.”
“What did he do?”
“It says here he was picked up for entering traffic,” Kang said. “Looks like he was yelling at drivers for obeying the stoplights. Probably alcohol-related.”
“I know him,” DJ said. “I’ll be right there.”
The station was on the Green line, so DJ arrived quickly. The officers were orderly and efficient. One took him past a large holding tank to a row of individual rooms. There he found Sun-ho lying alone on a metal bench. His eyes were open; DJ sat on the floor and looked into them. He saw a weary calm that suggested Sun-ho had been through a battle with the police, that the blank look had come after a long-avoided surrender.
“Is it true, my friend, have you been drinking?”
Sun-ho shook his head.
“Come, they’ll let me take you home.”
“I’m going to spend the night,” Sun-ho said. “I don’t mind it here. It’s warm, and a man can stretch out.”
“What, on this metal bench, locked in a holding room?”
“I need something from you,” Sun-ho said. “Will you do me a favor?”
“What kind of favor?”
“Why would you ask that? Do you forget everything I’ve done for you? Don’t you remember Najin? How about Comrade Seok? Have you forgotten the May Day shipment?”
“I saved your ass many times, too,” DJ said. “Your temper got you into a lot of trouble.”
“Just come to Gangnam tomorrow night, okay? If you come to one of my meetings, you’ll understand. This will all make sense. I’m in the tallest building on Dosan-daero, near Seolleung-ro. I’ll meet you out on the street outside, just after sunset.”
